The leading California exponent of so-called American Scene painting, Millard Sheets was a prolific artist whose bucolic pastoral images of farms, the shore, rural Mexico and Hawaii, in oils and, notably, watercolor, capture a picturesque view of the 20th century.

His work has a sunny, quiet disposition overall belying the era's harsher realities. Sheets held fast to his aesthetic principles---traditional restraint with some variations---marked by his signature Art Deco stylization.