I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold

"I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" is a painting by Charles Demuth, created in 1928. The painting is a part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. The painting depicts the number “5” three times, with part of the poet William Carlos Williams’ name at the top, amidst a forced, Cubist perspective of surging, grey planes. The painting is often considered Demuth’s greatest work and has been described as influenced by Futurism and Cubism. The painting was inspired by a verse the poet wrote after watching a fire engine streak past him on a rainy Manhattan street while waiting for Marsden Hartley, whose studio he was visiting, to answer his door.

Charles Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. He was born on November 8, 1883, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died on October 23, 1935, in the same city. Demuth was a lifelong resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the city’s modest commercial and civic architecture was the subject of hundreds of his watercolors and paintings. His depictions of warehouses, factories, and row houses imbue these ordinary structures (sometimes ironically) with a grandeur and glamor normally associated with cathedrals, palaces, and temples.