PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Nearly three dozen works by modernist painter Charles Demuth are on a first-ever touring exhibit with its first stop at the prestigious art school where he honed his skills.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is presenting 34 works from the permanent collection of the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, where he created the vast majority of his works until his death in 1935 at age 51. Many of the pieces have never been on view outside of his Pennsylvania hometown, where the artist kept a home and studio that he called "the chateau''.

"Most of our works are not well known, and we have such a great collection," said Anne Lampe, curator and executive director of the Demuth Museum. "You've had to be a real Demuth aficionado to know we existed, so it's important for us to share what we have with a wider audience."

The exhibition, called "Out of the Chateau'', is accompanied by eight Demuth watercolours and other works in the Pennsylvania Academy's permanent collection by his contemporaries, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Charles Sheeler. Though his most famous paintings reside in large museums, the Demuth Museum's collection includes rare examples of his childhood paintings and early pieces from Demuth's time at the academy from 1905 to 1910, including his only formal self-portrait.

"He led a very peripatetic lifestyle, but Lancaster was always his centre," said Lynn Marsden-Atlass, senior curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. "He knew all of the most influential people. He was out in the world, but he always went home."

Images of home for Demuth range from compositions of feed mills and city rooftops to floral watercolours inspired by his mother's garden outside his studio window. Also on view are sweet paintings of fairies and rabbits with school books from Demuth's childhood sketchbook, and early watercolours of Lancaster streetscapes and landscapes in which he experiments with impressionism, fauvism and Ashcan School styles of painting. Other subjects in the show include Demuth's visits to Provincetown, Massachusetts, New Hope, Pennsylvania, vaudeville theatres and New York salons and bathhouses.

Born in 1883 into a well-to-do family who had been running a successful tobacco shop since 1770, Demuth spent most of his life in frail health. He limped and often used a cane because of a malformed hip, and he developed diabetes in 1921.

His work was widely respected by the intelligentsia during his lifetime. He was part of the influential "Stieglitz circle" that included O'Keeffe and Dove as well as Alfred Stieglitz himself, but he was scarcely noticed in his conservative hometown. Demuth only showed a single painting in Lancaster, the 1907 self-portrait. The show is on view until December 9 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It travels from Philadelphia to the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at George Washington University in Washington, DC, from January 16 to March 14.