I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold is a shining declaration of friendship. And no, this wasn’t painted by Sesame Street’s Count von Count.

The artist was Charles Demuth, an American painter who went shoulder-to-shoulder with giants like Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley. He is best known as a precisionist, a somewhat brief American art movement that was a response to nearly every avante garde art style that erupted out of early twentieth century Europe like a volcano of paint and non-Euclidean forms. Just look at cubism, fauvism, or futurism and you’ll see how the precisionism of The Figure 5 in Gold is a rather neat response to all of them. That’s the American way: clean it up and gild it with an attractive sheen.

This painting is part of Demuth's poster portraits series. Each portrait was for a close friend, which is beyond charming (although imagine the devastation that one friend must’ve felt who didn’t get a portrait dedicated to them). Figure 5 was for his friend William Carlos Williams, the famous American poet, and is the most famous of the set. The title isn’t an obscure inside joke long forgotten to their bromance, but a line from Williams’ poem The Great Figure.

The poem, which is incredibly short and worth a read, was inspired by an experience Williams had where a fire truck sped past him with glitz and glamor, the number five, and the din of alarm bells on a rainy day. It sparked something in him, and he wrote the poem right then and there on the sidewalk. The whole painting, is in fact, a rather literal visualization of the poem. We see the row of lights, the darkness of night; we get a sense of clamor and speed, of a cold rainy night. Of course, there’s no firetruck, but the poem itself doesn’t make clear what the golden five is on or even is.

What’s interesting is that Demuth himself always wanted to be a writer and Williams an artist. The painting, then, can be read as such a heartfelt gift: Demuth literally transformed Williams poem into a painting, something the poet could never do. Williams, after Demuth’s death, would return the favor with his poem “The Crimson Cyclamen”. How sweet!