About this work
Two animals face each other across a small, irregularly shaped sheet of paperboard: a goat rendered in blazing red, and a black snake caught mid-slither. The composition is stripped to near-nothing — no background, no landscape, no framing device — just two creatures and the charged space between them. A red goat and a black snake eye each other in tense contemplation.
The goat's red color signals fear and high emotion, his eyes wide in terror, while the snake slithers alongside him — the outcome deliberately unresolved, a deadly strike possible, a peaceful passing equally so.
Traylor compresses a universe of volume and feeling into the flattest of shapes, effectively balancing positive and negative space and reducing physicality and mood into stark, saturated images. The tension lives entirely in that ambiguity — predator and prey, danger and survival, held in perfect, excruciating suspension.
*Red Goat with Snake* dates to around 1940–1942, rendered in opaque watercolor and pencil on paperboard measuring just 11¾ × 14¼ inches. Traylor made it during the concentrated burst of creativity he carried out on the sidewalks of Montgomery — a period in which he produced nearly 1,500 works. Traylor adeptly used animals as allegorical stand-ins for people, and this image is among his most distilled expressions of that instinct. In a way that is subtle but clear, Traylor conveys the tension African Americans lived with daily.
The danger exemplified by snakes depicted throughout his work reflects the sheer violence of the antebellum South and all that came after. The work now belongs to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it was featured in the landmark 2018 retrospective *Between Worlds*.
On a wall, this piece commands attention precisely because it asks for so little space. Its scale is intimate, its palette — that scorched red against white ground, the black snake cutting like a brushstroke — is bold enough to anchor a room without dominating it. It suits a collector drawn to work that thinks, not just decorates: someone who wants an image that rewards sustained looking and unsettles easy readings. Traylor depicted flat, simplified forms, none as straightforward as they seem at first glance. In a study, a reading corner, or alongside other works on paper, *Red Goat with Snake* holds its ground with the quiet authority of an artist who had lived through too much history to waste a single mark.
