About this work
The eye enters a tunnel-like street flanked by sidewalks and darkened buildings — much of the backdrop rendered in gray and black, relieved only by illuminated shop windows and globular streetlamps — while a red fire engine dominates the center, its form abstracted into urgent geometry.
A cascade of gold fives fills the canvas: a large arc in the upper right implies a number already disappearing beyond the frame, repeated in three complete, progressively smaller fives that press toward the viewer, giving the illusion of a truck hurtling forward — or receding into the night. The fire engine itself dissolves into red rectangles, with only a ladder on the right and an axle across the bottom surviving as legible forms.
Oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf combine on paperboard to produce a vibrant, tactile surface. The circular elements of the numeral are echoed in the truck's lamps, and the repetition of the gold five creates a layered sense of depth, while grey streaks of abstracted rain cause the blazing red to punch harder against the surrounding gloom. Hidden within the composition, Demuth secretes a private tribute: fragments of his friend's name — "Bill" across the top, "CARLO" in yellow dots reminiscent of a theater sign — alongside the poet's initials "W.C.W." and his own "C.D." rendered at the bottom in matching scale and color.
Completed in 1928, the painting reflects Demuth's late-career shift from watercolor to oil for larger, more ambitious compositions — a transition shaped in part by declining health from diabetes, diagnosed in 1920, which limited his physical energy and pushed him toward more controlled studio practice.
The source is a 32-word poem by William Carlos Williams, who claimed its inspiration struck while watching a fire engine pass him on a rainy night, gong clangs fading as it receded — he was so struck that he pulled out paper and pencil on the sidewalk and wrote the poem then and there. Two lines, "I saw the figure 5 / in gold," gave Demuth his title.
Scholars have celebrated the painting as a seminal work bridging European modernism — specifically Cubist fragmentation and Futurist dynamism — with distinctly American themes of urban energy and industrial precision.
It is, as one critic put it, "a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences" — a reference to the cross-pollination among the arts in the 1920s that produced American Modernism.
Demuth bequeathed the painting to Georgia O'Keeffe, who donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1948 as part of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection ,
