Charles Goeller

Charles Goeller (1901–1955) was born in Irvington, New Jersey. Upon graduating from high school Goeller studied mathematics, civil engineering, and architecture first at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and later at Cornell University. Afterwards his grandfather agreed to support five years of art and architecture study in France. Beginning in 1923 he received art instruction from Jean Despujols and other members of the faculty at the École Américaine de Fontainebleau. During this period Goeller also studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a small left-bank atelier in Paris 

He was best known for precise and detailed paintings and drawings in which, he once said, he aimed to achieve "emotion expressed by precision."Employing, as one critic wrote, an "exquisitely meticulous realism," he might take a full year to complete work on a single picture. Early in his career he achieved critical recognition for his still lifes, in which one critic saw an "acumen of genius" working to produce "truly superb achievement of team work between eyes that see and hands that do."Later, he also became known for cityscapes in which he employed precisionist flat planes and geometric forms to show the physical structures of his subjects.