A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”
George Bellows, The Lone Tenement, 1909, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.83

Maria Schneider and George Bellows’s “The Lone Tenement”

Season 2, Episode 7

Maria Schneider composed Bulería, Soleá y Rumba in the wake of a cancer diagnosis. Inspired by American artists such as Robert Henri and George Bellows, Schneider discusses “art for life’s sake” that tells a story of people—like the evocative figures in Bellows’s The Lone Tenement.

Award-winning, genre-defying musician Maria Schneider composed her “Bulería, Soleá y Rumba” in the wake of a cancer diagnosis. Inspired by American artists such as Robert Henri and his student, George Bellows, Schneider discusses “art for life’s sake”: works of art and music as sensory experiences that are alive, that tell a story of people—like the evocative figures in Bellows’s urban landscape of The Lone Tenement—and flow from the artist’s deep inner sense of connection.

A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”
George Bellows, The Lone Tenement, 1909, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.83

Like many American artists of his generation, George Bellows was interested in the urban construction that transformed New York City into an ultramodern metropolis. The Lone Tenement represents the nearly complete Blackwell’s Island Bridge (now known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge or 59th Street Bridge). Although the bridge was an impressive engineering feat and a symbol of progress, Bellows chose to focus on an abandoned tenement building and a group of figures warming themselves by a fire. Bellows imbued the composition with eerie wistfulness, recording the precarious positions of those being displaced to make way for the future.

George Bellows

Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio, on August 12, 1882. He entered Ohio State University in 1901 but dropped out in 1904 to study under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. A superb technician with a confident, painterly style, Bellows established himself as the most important realist of his generation. He created memorable images of club fights, street urchins, and construction sites, and garnered praise from both progressive and conservative critics. In 1909 Bellows was admitted to the National Academy of Design, and he helped organize the Armory Show in 1913. He died on January 8, 1925.

Maria Schneider
American composer and jazz orchestra leader

Maria Schneider’s music has been hailed by critics as “evocative, majestic, magical, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and beyond categorization.” She and her orchestra achieved acclaim with their first recording, Evanescence, in 1994. Today the Maria Schneider Orchestra, an 18-member collective made up of many of the finest contemporary musicians in jazz, performs at festivals and concert halls worldwide. Schneider has received numerous commissions and guest-conducting invites, working with more than 90 groups in over 30 countries, including Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and David Bowie. She and her orchestra have a distinguished recording career, with seven Grammy awards.

Charles Brock
Associate Curator, Department of American and British Paintings, National Gallery of Art

Charles Brock is associate curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art, where he has helped organize numerous exhibitions since 1990. In addition to his expertise in American painting, Brock has participated in several important photography projects. He was a major contributor to the catalog for the exhibition Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (2001) and, in 2006, authored Charles Sheeler: Across Media. In 2012 he organized the critically acclaimed retrospective George Bellows (2012). He is cocurator of the exhibition The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler (2022).