Elsie Driggs (1898 – July 12, 1992 in New York City) was an American painter known for her contributions to Precisionism, America's one indigenous modern-art movement before Abstract Expressionism, and for her later floral and figurative watercolors, pastels, and oils.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Driggs grew up in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City, in a family that was supportive of her artistic interests.

At twenty, she enrolled in classes at the Art Students League of New York, where she studied under George Luks and Maurice Sterne, both of whom were charismatic, inspirational figures in her early life.

[2] (Advised that the old-fashioned and misogynistic Daniel would be unlikely to take on a woman artist, she signed the works she left for his consideration simply "Driggs" and waited to meet him in person until he had expressed his eagerness to include her in his gallery.

She was an attractive and engaging woman, but her demeanor belied a strong ambition and a clear sense of what it would take to make her mark in the New York art world.

Although a later group of Precisionist painters, including Louis Lozowick, Ralston Crawford and others, came on the American Art scene during the 1930s, Driggs felt that the style came to an end with the 1929 stock market crash.

She called the picture "my El Greco" and expressed surprise that viewers in later years interpreted the painting as a work of social criticism.

[6] Like the other Precisionists (e.g., Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Louis Lozowick, Stefan Hirsch), she was concerned with applying modernist techniques to renderings of the new industrial and urban landscape, not in commenting on potential dangers the overly mechanized modern world of 1920s America might present.

With this painting, art critic Forbes Watson wrote, "Miss Driggs waves goodbye to her old master Maurice Sterne and embraces for the moment the age of machinery.

In 1929 Charles Daniel gave Driggs a one-woman show, which included one of her sleekest and most compelling paintings, Aeroplane, now in the collection of the Houston Museum of the Fine Arts.

[11] Actually, Driggs went to Detroit to make studies from the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant (Sheeler had preceded her there by a year).

In a group exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in 1924, "Chou" (collection of the Montclair Museum) a study of a cabbage, which was larger than life-sized, was displayed with works by Preston Dickenson, Andrew Dasburg and Thomas Hart Benton.

The rise of feminist art history brought her renewed attention, and she was the subject of a one-woman show at the Martin Diamond Gallery in 1980 and a retrospective at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton in 1990.

Curated by Thomas Folk, the retrospective exhibition, titled "Elsie Driggs, A Woman of Genius," traveled to the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.