After a lifetime on a plantation, former slave Bill Traylor moved to Montgomery, Alabama. There, from a doorstep on Monroe Street, he composed starkly modernist images of lively animals, vibrant landscapes, and active people. Among his most compelling subjects were dogs, recalling the animals from the plantation where he grew up. Rarely did Traylor depict a dog in the act of attacking, yet a sense of danger lingers in many of his scenes. His dogs range from loyal companions to ominous figures, echoing the bloodhounds once trained to track enslaved people. Whatever their nature, they populate Traylor’s narrative world with persistent force.

In his early pencil drawings, Traylor rendered dogs almost as portraits, but as his confidence grew, so did their scale and intensity. In Purple Dog, Red Tongue, visible pencil lines beneath the poster paint reveal his method of constructing the torso from a rectangular form before adding other features. Although he typically applied paint directly from the jar, here the fusion of red and blue into violet reshapes the animal’s presence, heightening its ferocity. Red stains the extremities with bloodlike heat, amplifying its emotional charge. His use of red was rare but deliberate, suggesting a keen awareness of color’s expressive and cultural resonance. Though the dog bares its teeth and widens its eyes, its stance remains stiff and controlled, creating a tension between restraint and viciousness. With the reappearance of the blade-shaped tail and the flailed-out tongue that became a signature of his vicious canines, Traylor distilled memory, history, and feeling into a blazing, unforgettable form.