Piano Mover's Holiday

Piano Mover’s Holiday is a painting by Charles Demuth, created in 1919. The painting depicts a group of piano movers taking a break from their laborious task. The painting is a part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection and is a tempera on paper artwork. The painting is a non-representational abstract-geometric piece of art, featuring a blue key-like shape with a black border on a white background.

Charles Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. He was born on November 8, 1883, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died on October 23, 1935, in the same city. Demuth was a lifelong resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the city’s modest commercial and civic architecture was the subject of hundreds of his watercolors and paintings. His depictions of warehouses, factories, and row houses imbue these ordinary structures (sometimes ironically) with a grandeur and glamor normally associated with cathedrals, palaces, and temples.