New Web objects Landscape

George Bellows

Date: 1909

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.10

Text Entries: In the spring of 1904 at the age of twenty-two, George Bellows turned down an opportunity to play professional baseball for the Cincinnati Reds opting instead to move to New York to pursue a career as an artist. Supporting himself by playing baseball for various leagues around New York, Bellows enrolled at The New York School of Art where he studied under Robert Henri. Henri encouraged his students to seek out "real" subjects, and Bellows' exuberant paintings of teeming waterfronts, bloody prize fights, smoky tenements, crowded evangelical tent meetings, buxom nudes, and the open American landscape throb with a palpable energy. Unlike most of his contemporaries Bellows never traveled to Europe, finding artistic instruction, support and subjects at home in the United States. As early as 1907, Bellows had received acclaim for his depictions of winter scenes, and the largest group extant is the Hudson River series, consisting of eleven paintings. The Palisades is one such work and offers a view across the Hudson River toward the Palisade cliffs of New Jersey. The thick layers of glistening paint-a hallmark of Bellows' work-seem to capture the vitality and rawness of the season. As one visitor to Bellows' studio recalled, "He [Bellows] would stand ten feet or more from the canvas, study it carefully, then rush forward almost on the run and work at the canvas rapidly and with large, free strokes of the brush." It is to this, perhaps, that one could attribute the seemingly inherent sense of freshness and immediacy that the painting exudes.