The Tournament

Beyond a row of fashionable spectators on the sidelines, white-clad male players engage in a game of doubles tennis while a sketchily rendered crowd watches from the galleries of a two-story clubhouse in the background in George Bellows's lithograph The Tournament. Rather than the athletic action of the game, the artist focuses attention on the varied bystanders. At left, a gentleman wearing a black jacket and white trousers with a white cap in hand leans on his cane as he converses with a seated lady dressed in white and a dark, brimmed hat. At right, the tennis official sits on an elevated chair beneath a striped awning. At center, near a spare racket and tennis balls, a lad and a girl sit on the ground beside a seated woman, seen from behind and almost hidden beneath her parasol. Bellows used the soft texture of the lithographic medium to emphasize graduated contrasts of light and dark in this lively, crowded composition.

The Tournament combines the artist's keen interest in sports with his talent for capturing the activities and atmosphere of daily life. This lithograph and its companion, Tennis (TF 1995.11), were inspired by tennis tournaments he attended at the Newport Casino during his summers at the genteel Rhode Island resort town of Newport, in 1918 and 1919. The Tournament is a lithographic rendering of Bellows's 1919 painting of the same title (private collection) and relates closely to Tennis at Newport (private collection), painted the same year he made the print. Around the time Bellows made these works, he was turning from the gritty urban and working-class scenes with which he was closely associated earlier in his career toward more saleable subjects, including leisure life and his own family. At the same time, he was realizing significant sales of his masterful lithographs, which maintained an important position in his work throughout the last nine years of his life. 

Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, July 15–October 31, 2007.

Bellows, Emma S. and Thomas Beer. George W. Bellows: His Lithographs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927, p. 103.

Mason, Lauris and Joan Ludman. The Lithographs of George Bellows: A Catalog Raisonné. Millwood, New York: KTO Press, 1977. No. 72, p. 115.

George Wesley Bellows: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. (exh. cat., Columbus Museum of Art). Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1979. No. 75, p. 83; no. 42, p. 53.

Mason, Lauris and Joan Ludman. The Lithographs of George Bellows: A Catalog Raisonné. San Francisco: A. Wofsy Fine Arts, 1992. No. 72, p. 133.

Lithographs from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Harold Rifkin. (exh. cat., Adelson Galleries). New York: Adelson Galleries, 1999. No. 17.