Vidi il numero 5 in oro

This is a portrait with no face in it. In 1928 Charles Demuth set out to paint his old friend the poet and doctor William Carlos Williams, and instead of Williams himself he painted one of Williams's poems. That poem, The Great Figure, is 32 words the writer jotted on a sidewalk after a red fire engine tore past him in the night, its number 5 flashing by. Demuth gives you that number three times over, growing larger as it rushes toward you under city lights. Look for the words worked into it. Bill runs across the top, Carlo glows in yellow lamp bulbs, and down at the bottom sit two sets of initials the same size, W.C.W. for the poet and C.D. for the painter. It was one of a handful of these poster portraits Demuth made of friends through the 1920s.