Art by George Ault

Ault painted in the sharp, geometric, realist style known as Precisionism, but his biography carries more tragedy than his crisp, controlled paintings ever let on. Born into a wealthy Cleveland family, he lost that fortune along with the rest of his family after the 1929 crash, and all three of his brothers eventually died by suicide; his mother had earlier died in a mental institution, and Ault himself struggled with alcoholism. He moved to Woodstock, New York in 1937, living without running water or electricity, and spent his final years obsessively painting a single rural crossroads in a series called "Russell's Corners," quiet nighttime scenes that read, in hindsight, like a man trying to hold onto something stable. He drowned in a nearby creek in 1948, ruled a suicide.