Elsie Driggs, of Hartford, Connecticut, is best known as a precisionist* painter who, in the 1920s, responded to the clean, abstract beauty of the machine age in geometrically simplified compositions. Driggs studied at the Art Students League* (1919 1925), and with Maurice Sterne in Rome.

Her romantic feelings about industrial forms were part of the general optimism during the booming prosperity of the 1920s. Her painting, Pittsburgh (1928), was inspired by a trip to the Jones and Laughlin steel mills, of which she said: "The particles of dust in the air seemed to catch and reflect the light to make a backdrop of luminous pale gray behind the shapes of simple smoke stack and cone. To me it was Gre...