It’s the 5th of February…my favorite day of the year! The number five brings back a special memory. I’m five years old, sitting on the floor in the living room of our rented trailer looking through an art book for children. I loved that book, but I had one favorite picture. I was entranced by this fractured image around a large number 5. I must have pestered my mother to read the description more than once because I knew it was about a fire engine. It’s been more than three decades since I saw that picture, but I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve always thought it was called ‘Fire engine no 5’, but I was wrong. This morning I looked it up on line. It’s called ‘The Figure 5 in Gold’. The artist was Charles Demuth who lived from 1883-1935. Looking at it after all these years I’m still entranced. It’s like someone fractured a glass into a story and the number 5 emerges as the hero. Demuth painted the picture after reading a poem written by his friend William Carlos Williams about a fire enguine he saw passing in the rain through the city. Share my memory…have a look…
The Great Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
-W C Williams
It’s beautifull, thank you for sharing it. Paintings/art is one of my favorite pastimes one day I hope to travel and visit musuems like the louvre (hope I spelled it right)Museo del prado in spain and others. I like the old masters, Da Vinci, Botticello, Titan. I love the colors in this Number 5
@Victoria
You have excellent taste in art! There’s nothing like seeing a painting in the flesh that one has loved for years in books…invariably they’re smaller or larger than one imagined and so much more potent. Van Dyke isn’t an Old Master, but he was certainly a master. Photographs in books just don’t do him justice. I used to flip past them with a sneer of boredom and then I came face to face with portraits of a husband and wife he painted (at The Wallace Collection in London). I was stunned! He’d captured their souls on cavans. I stood there and cried for the two people I knew nothing about, but who were clearly miserable. The husband, Philip Le Roy, has this tense angry hand clutching his sword and his eyes are sad, but his lips determined. I went home and looked them up and sure enough…he was a bastard who had no claim to his father’s name and was raised by his mother’s father. Through his merits he rose to a position of power and married a wealthy pretty girl who looks like the beautiful bird/trophy in a cage that I’m sure she was.
I think great art always inspires or tells a story. It doesn’t have to be a nice story, but it should be a story. Great art holds us spell-bound. I read somewhere that the old English word for story was spell. The people considered to be witches cast a spell or literally threw a new story at people…changing or ending their lives (or so they believed). I love that image of casting a story.
“The Figure 5 in Gold” by the artist Charles Demuth who lived from 1883-1935 is a great piece of art.