Trained both as an architect and painter, Morton Schamberg lived a short but productive life, and earned a reputation for being a visionary who foresaw machines as both dehumanizing and contributing to good living. Throughout his life, he was fascinated by what he perceived as beauty in their shapes and lines, and in 1916 began a series of still lifes paintings of machine objects. He was also an accomplished photographer, concentrating primarily on portrait subjects.

Schamberg was born in Philadelphia and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and beginning 1903, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. At the Academy, he was a student of William Merritt Chase and was best friends with Charle...