25 Facts About George Bellows

George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City.

George Bellows became, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".

George Wesley Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio.

George Bellows was the only child of George Bellows and Anna Wilhelmina Smith Bellows.

George Bellows was born four years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty and forty.

George Bellows's mother was the daughter of a whaling captain based in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and his family returned there for their summer vacations.

At age 10, George took to athletics, and trained to be a baseball and basketball player.

George Bellows became good enough at both sports to play semipro ball for years afterward.

George Bellows declined, opting to enroll at Ohio State University.

George Bellows was encouraged to become a professional baseball player, and he worked as a commercial illustrator while a student and continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life.

George Bellows left Ohio State in 1904, just before he was to graduate, and moved to New York City to study art.

George Bellows was a student of Robert Henri, who at the time was teaching at the New York School of Art.

George Bellows first achieved widespread notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies.

George Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter.

George Bellows's fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.

George Bellows taught at the first Modern School in New York City, and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal The Masses, to which he contributed many drawings and prints beginning in 1911.

George Bellows was criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war.

The artist Joseph Pennell argued that because George Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he had no right to paint them.

George Bellows responded that he had not been aware that Leonardo da Vinci "had a ticket to paint the Last Supper".

George Bellows taught at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919.

George Bellows died on January 8,1925, in New York City, of peritonitis, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix.

George Bellows was survived by his wife, Emma Story Bellows, and daughters Anne and Jean.

Paintings and prints by George Bellows are in the collections of many major and regional American art museums, including the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, Texas, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, and the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, New York.

The Columbus Museum of Art in George Bellows' hometown has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and New York street scenes.

George Bellows's work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.