In Woodstock the couple lived a penurious existence in a small rented cottage that had no electricity or indoor plumbing.

[5] In 1948, Ault was discovered dead five days after drowning in the Sawkill Brook on December 30, when he had taken a solitary walk in stormy and dark weather.

He is often grouped with Precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford because of his unadorned representations of architecture and urban landscapes.

However, the ideological aspects of Precisionism and the unabashed modernism of its influences are not so apparent in his work—for instance, he once referred to skyscrapers as the "tombstones of capitalism" and considered the industrialized American city "the Inferno without the fire".

[7] Ault painted what he saw around him, simplifying detail slightly into flat shapes and planes, and portraying the underlying geometric patterns of structures.