George Wesley Bellows 1882-1925

George Wesley Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882. He studied at Ohio State University, where he was a star athlete. However, the illustrations that Bellows completed for the university’s yearbook better signal his ultimate path: In 1904, Bellows left college to study painting with Robert Henri in New York City. Influenced by Henri and inspired by his tutelage, Bellows became a leader amongst the Ashcan school, described as the “most bold and most versatile” of its members in his choice of subjects, palettes, and techniques. Although Bellows’s art was “rooted in” the gritty realism of the Ashcan School, “the variety of his subjects and his experiments with color and compositional theories” as well as his loose brushwork better “aligned him with modernism.” Indeed, in 1913, Bellows enjoyed a key role in the organization of the famous New York Armory Show. He was greatly inspired by the Modernist work he saw in the show, which led to “one of the most creative and energetic periods of his career.” Choosing to articulate his individuality, Bellows painted with colors not tied to nature, but rather with those linked to his personal aesthetics. Liberating form and color from their normative state, Bellows’s paintings “marked the transition from an art world rooted in idealized academic works to one of personal expression.”

Although he was born and raised in Ohio, Bellows was not “in a true sense a product of that state,” descended from settlers on the Montauk end of Long Island.” Even when living in New York, Bellows was drawn to the water, its “assertive presence” casting a hold over him. While fascinated by the sea, though, Bellows was also frightened of it–– “at times inescapably attracted to it, he was also repelled by it.” Bellows “at last took up the challenge of painting the sea” in the summer of 1910 while in Montauk, a watershed time for him artistically and also personally, as he was newly engaged. In Bellows’s first seascapes, he was influenced by Winslow Homer. These works “[reinterpret] Homer’s pictorial language, with broadly simplified planes of land and sea…and the flattening of space.” Bellows was focused on conveying through his depictions of the sea his conflicting feelings toward it, that powerful dichotomy between beauty and fear. The result was not a “single, clear-cut” or “easily definable meaning” but rather “something profoundly and deeply evocative.” After the impact of the Armory Show, Bellows returned to his seascapes with a new lens. All of their mystery, their uncertainty, was replaced with “an exuberant celebration of the ocean’s boundless, primal energy.”

Tending the Lobster Traps, Early Morning, painted c. 1914, is a wonderful example of Bellows’s movement towards a more modern form of seascape. Bellows had begun to travel to Monhegan in 1911, finding a wealth of subject matter and inspiration in the beautiful Maine land and seascape. His post-Armory experiments with color lent themselves to a personal and expressive group of paintings full of vibrant ultra-marine and emerald green, of warm reds and yellows and oranges. Tending the Lobster Traps shows the sea as a wash of blue-green, at once the dark and mysterious body Bellows had originally depicted and also bright and turquoise, inviting and invigorating. The figures of the fishermen in the midground appear grounded and sturdy, completely at ease with the strength and wildness of the sea. The smaller figures in the background are connected with the sea directly, depicted in the midst of physical interaction with the water. Tending the Lobster Traps echoes Bellows’s earlier “reinterpretations” of Homer’s seascapes, with its almost abstract, flattened space and the simplified blocks of sea and land. Bellows’s incredible technical ability–– his textured, deliberate handling of paint–– adds the dimension to this work which brings it to life.

Tending the Lobster Traps, dated to 1914, coincides interestingly with another work, Bellows’s now destroyed Fisherman’s Family (1914-15). Bellows revisited this composition in 1923. The second version of Fisherman’s Family still exists, although we have only a photograph of the original. In this work, Bellows “created an ideal vision, one that defined his life with clarity, order, and security.” The vision in question is one in which Bellows imagines himself “in the guise of a type of man he admired, the hard-working Maine fisherman.” He stands with his wife, Emma, and their daughter, their backs to the waves, demonstrating Bellows’s newly found ease with the sea. The Maine locale is emphasized with a rocky outcrop and a group of fishermen standing around a table. The bottom left quarter of the original Fisherman’s Family, containing this group of fishermen, is strikingly similar to Tending the Lobster Traps. Not only does the group of fishermen appear identical to that in Fisherman’s Family, but the dimensions of Tending the Lobster Traps align with those of the section from Fisherman’s Family. Both works are executed in oil on panel, and Tending the Lobster Traps has early exhibition records which title it as Fisherman’s Family. Knowing that the first Fisherman’s Family was destroyed sometime after 1919, it seems likely that Tending the Lobster Traps is a cut-down and reworked fragment of the larger painting. The foreground and background of Tending the Lobster Traps differ from Fisherman’s Family, but it seems unlikely that if Bellows were to have painted this grouping again, the brushwork would be recreated in such exact detail. It appears that Bellows kept the section of the fishermen and reworked the rest, in order to finish what was initially part of a larger painting. That Bellows chose to keep this portion of Fisherman’s Family is telling of both its compositional and technical importance and its significance to Bellows personally, a snapshot of the hard-working, rugged Maine life which he so admired.