Douglas is widely credited to have been the first African American artist to adopt an avant-garde style. This painting is based upon an illustration he made for God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), a book by noted author and civil rights advocate James Weldon Johnson. Its subject tells the story of a winged angel of death who races through the heavens on horseback to rescue a woman from a life of suffering. Perhaps underscoring the theme of deliverance is the single star placed prominently in the composition, which according to some scholars symbolizes the North Star that guided fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad.
