George C. Ault embraced the American Precisionist movement, which fused the flat, geometric planes of European Cubism with an idealized form of realism to celebrate America’s new industrial landscape of skyscrapers, factories, and bridges. The Precisionists generally did not include human figures in their works, preferring instead to depict forms so pristine that they almost appear to have manufactured themselves.

Ault’s "Highland Light" depicts a sixty-six-foot-tall lighthouse built in 1857 in North Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. The building was a technological relic whose beacon was converted from a kerosene lamp to electricity in 1932. Ault painted this work in the year of his father’s death and of the suicides of two of his brothers. The columnar tower and beacon, suggestive of a memorial or a monument, seem to illustrate Ault’s comment that his paintings were a means of “creating order out of chaos.”