Manigault's brief painting career coincided with the critical years of emerging American modernism. Interest in his work was eclipsed after his death at the age of thirty-five and did not revive until 1946, when his paintings were included in the exhibition Pioneers of Modern Art in America 1903-1918 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Born in London, Ontario, in 1887 to American parents from Charleston, South Carolina, Manigault left home in 1905 to study at the Art Students League in New York, where he became a student and close friend of Kenneth Hayes Miller. He made his New York exhibition debut in 1909 and in April of the following year participated in the Exhibition of Independent Artists, organized by Robert Henri. Manigault traveled and worked abroad briefly in England and France in the spring of 1912. His first one-artist show at Charles Daniel Gallery in the spring of 1914 met with significant critical and popular acclaim for the startling originality of the works on exhibit. During World War I he joined the British expeditionary forces, serving in Flanders as an ambulance driver from April to November of 1915, when he was discharged for medical reasons.

Although he worked steadily until the final year of his life, only a few of his works survive, for he himself destroyed numerous canvases (possibly as many as two hundred). The notebook record he kept of his works begins in 1906 and ends abruptly in 1919, when he and his wife--whom he married in 1915, two days before he was shipped abroad--moved to Los Angeles. Little of his late work satisfied him, least of all the Cubist and abstract experiments he attempted after 1919, and later, for the most part, destroyed. After 1915 he increasingly earned money from artistic endeavors other than painting, such as ceramics, which he began to produce in 1916.
Manigault's deteriorating health was possibly complicated by fasting, which he believed would enable him "to approach the spiritual plane and see colors not perceptible to the physical eye." Apparently he became too weak to transfer his visions to canvas. He collapsed and died while working in San Francisco in September 1922.

Manigault's career is characterized by insistent experimentation; his works are striking for their imaginative, decorative sense. His early works are grounded in the real world, but later works show that he became increasingly entranced by the world of imagination. Before his war service he completed series of fantastic visionary landscapes (for example, Mountainous Landscape, Wide Valley, 1913. Argot Art Museum, Elmira, New York) and allegories (such as Nymph and Pierrot Eyes of Morning, 1913, Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida) that align him with American symbolists and visionaries such as Arthur B. Davies. These works foreshadow the mystical themes of his late paintings, which reflect the influence of the Orient. Much of the potential of Manigault's prewar painting, heralded by the critics in 1914, was unrealized in the abstract experiments and visionary excesses of his late work.

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston