Preston Dickinson

William Preston Dickinson (September 9, 1889 – November 25, 1930) was an American modern artist, best known for his paintings of industrial subjects in the Precisionist style.

Biography William Preston Dickinson was born on September 9, 1889, in New York City, a third-generation American in a working-class family. His father was an amateur painter who made a living as a calligrapher and interior decorator; he died when Preston was only eleven years old. Dickinson was motivated by a reverence for the benefits of technology and industry to humanity, as well as an interest in its formal qualities. Some of his work in the 1920s was also observed by critics as having an Oriental influence, believed to derive from his studies of Japanese ukiyo-e art.

Dickinson produced fewer than two hundred works during his twenty-year career. He usually did not sign or date his works, which together with his stylistic experimentation makes it difficult to place them in a chronology.