Charles Demuth

In 1928 Charles Demuth painted a big gold number 5 rushing forward against red and grey, called 'I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold'. It is a portrait with no face, a tribute to his friend the poet William Carlos Williams, built from a Williams poem about a fire engine clanging through the streets.

Demuth was a leader of American Precisionism, the crisp, hard-edged style that found beauty in grain elevators, factories and steel. He painted the mills of his native Lancaster in Pennsylvania as clean geometric stacks, though he was equally fine in delicate flower and figure watercolours.

He lived with diabetes and was among the first Americans treated with insulin after it arrived in the 1920s. He died in 1935, at 51.