George Bellows (1882 – 1925) was an American realist painter known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City. Bellows was part of the Ashcan School, which was an artistic movement in the United States during the early 20th century.
Best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city’s more impoverished neighborhoods.
The movement has been seen as symbolic of the spirit of political rebellion of the period.
Virtual Tour of George Bellows
- Cliff Dwellers
- Men of the Docks
- Dempsey and Firpo
- River Front No. 1
- New York
- Both Members of This Club
- The Art of Boxing
- Stag at Sharkey’s
- Club Night
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic movement in early-20th-century in the United States. The Ashcan School favored the realistic depiction of gritty urban subjects.
Some critics called new York Realists the “apostles of ugliness.” One critic conferred the pejorative label “Ashcan School” to their at, and it became the standard term for this first significant American art movement of the 20th century.
Highlights Tour of George Bellows
Cliff Dwellers
“Cliff Dwellers” by George Bellows depicts the density and crowds on New York City’s Lower East Side, on a hot summer’s day. The painting, made in 1913, highlights the city’s explosive population growth.
The city grew from one-and-a-half to five million in the forty years proceedings this depiction, primarily due to immigration.
In this painting, people spill out of tenement buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. Laundry flaps overhead, and a street vendor hawks his goods from his pushcart amid all the traffic.
In the background, a trolley car heads toward Vesey Street. Many of the new arrivals, Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Chinese, crowded into tenement houses on the Lower East Side.
Among them were thousands of Eastern European Jews, who found temporary or permanent shelter along streets such as East Broadway, the setting for Cliff Dwellers.
Museum: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Men of the Docks
“Men of the Docks” by George Bellows depicts a group of men wearing overcoats, standing at a dock in Brooklyn, New York City, together with some draught horses.
A steam liner looms over them to their right, and in the center is a tugboat. The waters are iced up by winter, and in the background are the skyscrapers of the lower Manhattan skyline.
The winter weather seems bleak and grey as the men look for work at the docks. The men are looking to the left, and we can only speculate about what has drawn their attention.
Is it news that no work is available or a notice that the men are required for labor. In the early 20th century, day laborers in the New York docks worked depending on the availability of ships to unload.
When not working, they often stood nearby, waiting for news that there was work. This painting is a significant example of Bellows’ treatment of the subject in which he emphasizes the precariousness of the laborers’ situation.
Museum: National Gallery, London
River Front No. 1
“River Front No. 1” by George Bellows depicts the city’s poor boys bathing at the riverfront docks, on a hot day. Bellows took an ordinary urban subject and celebrated it with color.
The contrast between the blues and the pale bodies and the explosion of human diversity all draw our attention.
Bellows painted many river scenes throughout his career, and he also focused on the human form in a number of his works. His urban New York scenes depicted the chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods.
Bellows developed his keen sense of light by exhibiting a stark contrast between the blue and pale colors in his art.
He was also an expert in creating visual texture in depicting the rough and grimy city structures and in creating an aesthetically ironic image.
Museum: Columbus Museum of Art
New York
New York by George Bellows is a large painting that captures the essence of modern life in New York City in 1911. The view looks uptown toward Madison Square from the intersection of Broadway and 23rd Street, but Bellows drew on several commercial districts to create an imaginary composite.
His focus was to show the crowds and traffic to convey a sense of the city’s hectic pace. Bellows assembled all of these diverse elements of New York into one scene.
As one critic commented: “Trucks are darting through the crowd. Men and women are hurrying across the streets. Trolleys are clanging their way in and out, a policeman is keeping people from being run over, you feel the rush; you hear the noise, and you wish you were safely home.”
Museum: National Gallery of Art, DC
Dempsey and Firpo
“Dempsey and Firpo” by George Bellows depicts the boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo on September 14, 1923.
The painting depicts the dramatic moment when Firpo knocked Dempsey out of the ring, even though Dempsey was the eventual winner that night.
The work is painting in the style of the Ashcan School movement, and it has become Bellows’ most famous painting. Bellows gave himself a cameo as the balding man at the extreme left of the picture.
The fight was a historic boxing fight. It was the first time that a Latin American fighter would challenge for the World Heavyweight title, and it was one of the defining matches of Dempsey’s career.
Dempsey had been champion since 1919, and Firpo was one of the top heavyweights of the world. Eighty thousand fans paid to see the fight live at the Polo Grounds in New York City.
Museum: Whitney Museum of American Art
Both Members of This Club
“Both Members of This Club” by George Bellows is the third and largest of George Bellows’s early prize-fighting subjects.
The painting’s title is a reference to the practice in private athletic clubs of introducing the contestants to the audience as “both members” to circumvent the law.
The Lewis Law made prize-fighting illegal in New York State. Boxing continued in New York on a club membership basis until 1911.
Boxing was a controversial subject, but the interracial theme made this painting even more so, especially since the black boxer appears to be winning the match.
This painting follows the success of the African American professional prizefighter Jack Johnson, who had won the world heavyweight championship in 1908.
The idea of a black boxing champion was unsettling to then social order. Museum: National Gallery of Art, DC
The Art of Boxing
Stag at Sharkey’s
“Stag at Sharkey’s” by George Bellows depicts two boxers fighting at Sharkey’s Athletic Club situated across from his studio in 1909.
Participants in the boxing ring were usually members of the club, but occasionally outsiders would fight with temporary memberships. These fighters were known as “stags.”
The Club was founded by Tom “Sailor” Sharkey, an ex-fighter who had also served in the US Navy. Public boxing was illegal in New York at the time, so only private events could be arranged for a boxing bout to take place.
Participation was usually limited to members of a particular club, but whenever an outsider competed, he was given temporary membership.
Boxing had many detractors who considered it barbaric, its proponents, among them President Theodore Roosevelt, regarded it as a healthy manifestation of manliness.
Around the time Bellows painted this painting, boxing was moving from a predominantly working-class event to one with a broader social appeal.
Club Night
“Club Night” by George Bellows was the first of three similar boxing subjects that Bellows painted Between 1907 to 1909.
This painting represents a fight at an athletic club in New York City where attendees paid club membership fees instead of admission fees to a specific fight, allowing them to gamble on matches legally.
The public’s response to boxing varied; some regarded boxing as savage and brutal, but many thought it a natural manifestation of masculinity.
From a stylistic perspective, Bellows’s boxing paintings show the influence of the European masters.
George Bellows
George Bellows
- Name: George Wesley Bellows
- Born: 1882 – Columbus, Ohio USA
- Died: 1925 (aged 42) – New York City, NY USA
- Nationality: American
- Movement: Ashcan School, American realism
George Bellows: A collection of 266 works
George Bellows Quotes~~~
“Try everything that can be done. Be deliberate. Be spontaneous. Be thoughtful and painstaking. Be abandoned and impulsive. Learn your own possibilities.”
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“The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful.”
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“I found myself in my first art school under the direction of Robert Henri… My life began at this point.”
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“The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.”
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“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
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“Art strives for structure and aspires for magnificence. “
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“Lacking choice, art dies.”
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George Bellows
A Tour of Artists and their Art
- Duccio (1255 – 1319)
- Sandro Botticelli (1445 – 1510)
- Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448 – 1494)
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)
- Albrecht Durer (1471 – 1528)
- Michelangelo (1475 – 1564)
- Raphael (1483 – 1520)
- Titian (1488 – 1576)
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 – 1569)
- Paolo Veronese (1528 – 1588)
- El Greco (1541 – 1614)
- Caravaggio (1571 – 1610)
- Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640)
- Georges de La Tour (1593 – 1652)
- Anthony van Dyck (1599 – 1641)
- Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665)
- Diego Velázquez (1599 – 1660)
- Rembrandt (1606 – 1669)
- Pieter de Hooch (1629 – 1684)
- Johannes Vermeer (1632 – 1675)
- Élisabeth Sophie Chéron (1648 – 1711)
- Canaletto (1697 – 1768)
- François Boucher (1703 – 1770)
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806)
- Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828)
- Jacques-Louis David (1748 – 1825)
- Katsushika Hokusai ( 1760 – 1849)
- Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840)
- J.M.W. Turner (1775 – 1851)
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867)
- Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863)
- Rosa Bonheur (1822 – 1899)
- Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904)
- John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896)
- Frederic Leighton (1830 – 1896)
- Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883)
- Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917)
- Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910)
- Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906)
- Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917)
- Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919)
- Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895)
- Henri Rousseau (1844 – 1910)
- Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926)
- Elizabeth Thompson (1846 – 1933)
- Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894)
- John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917)
- Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890)
- Frederick McCubbin (1855 – 1917)
- John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925)
- Tom Roberts (1856 – 1931)
- Lovis Corinth (1858 – 1925)
- Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891)
- Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918)
- Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944)
- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
- Rupert Bunny (1864 – 1947)
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944)
- Arthur Streeton (1867 – 1943)
- Franz Marc (1880 – 1916)
- Goyō Hashiguchi (1880 – 1921)
- George Bellows (1882 – 1925)
- Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967)
- Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920)
- Artists and their Art
Famous George Bellows Paintings
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“The artist is the person who makes
life more interesting or beautiful,
more understandable or mysterious, or probably,
in the best sense, more wonderful.”
– George Bellows
~~~
Photo Credit: 1) Robert Henri [Public domain]
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