Born into slavery, William “Bill” Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) spent much of his life after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation working as a farmhand and sharecropper in rural Alabama.

Traylor had three wives and at least fifteen children. After his last wife died in the mid-1920s, he moved alone to the city of Montgomery, where he worked as a shoemaker and factory worker. Soon after, his rheumatism stopped him from working. It was only then, homeless and in his eighties, that Traylor began making drawings and paintings on paper, using pencil, gouache and other media. His works, depicting cats and dogs, rabbits, street figures, dancers, and other characters or hieratic abstractions of simple forms are visually striking and politically assertive, simple and yet powerful. Charles Shannon—a painter and the leader of a progressive group of young white artists in Montgomery—noticed and befriended Traylor in 1939, providing him with money and materials. Traylor had his first public show at New South in 1940, presenting about one hundred of his drawings. None sold.

Few people knew anything of Traylor until 1982, when his work was the sensation of “Black Folk Art in America”, a show at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington. His work has since then been the subject of many exhibitions, including a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in 2018: "Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor".

During the II WW years, Bill Traylor moved around the homes of his various children, who were scattered in Washington D.C., Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. During his time in Washington, he had a gangrenous leg amputated. He chose to return to Montgomery, preferring his life on Monroe Street, where he died in 1949 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. A handsome headstone was installed, by his descendants, in March 2018.

Traylor’s vibrant imagery and colour palette inspire and compose the patterns created for our Autumn-Winter 2020 collection.