Bellows, George Wesley

Bellows, George Wesley (1882–1925). American painter and lithographer, born in Columbus, Ohio. He studied at Ohio State University before moving in 1904 to New York, where he was a pupil of Robert Henri and became associated with the Ashcan School. An outstanding athlete in his youth and noted for his hearty, outgoing character, Bellows is best known for his boxing scenes. The most famous of them is A Stag at Sharkey's (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1907), remarkable for its vivid sense of movement and energetic, sketchy brushwork: he said ‘I don't know anything about boxing [a ‘stag’ was a boxing match held in a private club]; I'm just painting two men trying to kill each other'. Such works rapidly won him a reputation, and in 1909—aged 27— he became the youngest person ever elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design. He took a highly active part in the art life of his day and was one of the organizers of the Armory Show in 1913. After this, his work tended to become less concerned with movement, placing more emphasis on formal balance. He was a man of strong social conscience, and his work included scenes of the urban poor—of which the most famous is the crowded tenement scene Cliff Dwellers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1913)—and a series of paintings and lithographs about First World War atrocities. He did not take up lithography until 1916, but in the nine remaining years of his life he produced almost 200 prints, and he is accorded a high place among modern American printmakers; his A Stag at Sharkey's (1917), in which he reworked the composition of his celebrated painting, has been described as ‘the most famous American print of this century’ ( Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, American Prints 1879–1979, 1980). In the last five years of his life Bellows turned to landscapes and portraits and was considered one of the finest American portraitists of his day. His early death was caused by a ruptured appendix.