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Lot Essay
After a lifetime on a plantation, former slave Bill Traylor (1854-1949) moved to Montgomery, Alabama. Crippled with rheumatism, he began to draw. From a doorstep on Monroe Street he rendered starkly modernist farm animals, architectural elements, dancing, drinking and fighting figures, and other images evoking his current and previous experiences.
Three Figures with Dog, Bird and Construction is one of Traylor's "exciting events," as it includes multiple figures and animals interacting on and around an abstracted structural element. Traylor was inspired by the architecture of Montgomery, and research by Fred Baron and Jeffrey Wolf suggests that some of the artist's delineated constructions drew from the 1885 Court Square Fountain by Frederick MacMonnies, visible from the doorstep where Traylor worked (High Museum of Art, Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Atlanta, 2012), p. 25). The abstracted construction in this composition, with its circular base and spout-like center, indeed seems to reference the Court Square landmark.
Three Figures with Dog, Bird and Construction is one of Traylor's "exciting events," as it includes multiple figures and animals interacting on and around an abstracted structural element. Traylor was inspired by the architecture of Montgomery, and research by Fred Baron and Jeffrey Wolf suggests that some of the artist's delineated constructions drew from the 1885 Court Square Fountain by Frederick MacMonnies, visible from the doorstep where Traylor worked (High Museum of Art, Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Atlanta, 2012), p. 25). The abstracted construction in this composition, with its circular base and spout-like center, indeed seems to reference the Court Square landmark.