Maud Murray Dale (Mrs. Chester Dale)

1919

George Bellows

Painter, American, 1882 - 1925

Media Options

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Born in Rochester, New York, Maud Dale (1875–1953) studied art in Paris and in 1911 married the stockbroker Chester Dale. She encouraged her husband to become an avid art collector, and by the mid-1920s the Dales had assembled one of the largest and most important private collections of modern art in the United States. Chester Dale later said: “She loved the paintings, I did all the buying.”

Maud Dale commissioned George Bellows to paint her portrait in the spring of 1919, but he struggled with the task for a variety of reasons and eventually destroyed the picture. She openly criticized it and complained that the artist was “a bit vulgar, a bit too loud.” When Bellows spent that summer in Middletown, Rhode Island, the Dales were vacationing in nearby Newport. Maud Dale was determined to have her likeness satisfactorily painted and prevailed upon her husband to commission two new portraits for a total of $3,000. The Gallery’s portrait is one of two likenesses that Bellows painted in his Middletown studio. The portrait conveys a strong sense of the sitter’s powerful personality and confirms one art historian’s statement that “very few people, including her husband, argued long with Maud Dale.”

On View

NGA, West Building, M-113, W

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on wood

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 101.5 x 85 cm (39 15/16 x 33 7/16 in.)
    framed: 125.1 x 108.6 x 5.7 cm (49 1/4 x 42 3/4 x 2 1/4 in.)

  • Accession

    1944.15.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Maud Murray Dale (Mrs. Chester Dale), 1919

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Commissioned 1919 by the sitter's second husband, Chester Dale [1883-1962], New York;[1] gift 1944 to NGA.
[1] The artist's Record Book (jointly owned by The Ohio State University Libraries' Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio) documents that the painting was commissioned by Chester Dale, but the Dale collection records (Chester Dale Paper, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington) indicate the sitter commissioned her own portrait (copies of both in NGA curatorial files).

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1927

  • Catalogue of the Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1927, no. 5.

  • Summer Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, 1927, no. 24.

1937

  • An Exhibition of American Paintings from the Chester Dale Collection, The Union League Club, New York, 1937, no. 50, as Portrait.

1943

  • Twentieth-Century Portraits, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1943, unnumbered catalogue.

1948

  • New Yorkers 1848-1948, Portraits, Inc., New York, 1948, no. 5.

1957

  • George Bellows: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1957, no. 37, repro.

1965

  • The Chester Dale Bequest, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1965, unnumbered checklist.

2010

  • From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, January 2010-January 2012, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

Bibliography

1922

  • Town & Country (1 May 1922); color repro on cover, 24.

1929

  • Bellows, Emma Louise Story. The Paintings of George Bellows. New York, 1929: 90.

1930

  • Read, H.A. "The Chester Dale Collection." Vogue 25 (15 February 1930): 80.

1942

  • Boswell, Peyton, Jr. George Bellows. New York, 1942: 15, 40, repro.

1947

  • Butterfield, Roger. "The Millionaires' Best Friend." Saturday Evening Post (8 March 1947): 79.

1965

  • Paintings other than French in the Chester Dale Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 52, repro.

  • Morgan, Charles H. George Bellows. Painter of America. New York, 1965: 14, 224-225, 246, 254-255.

1970

  • American Paintings and Sculpture: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1970: 16, repro.

1971

  • Braider, Donald. George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting. New York, 1971: 119-120.

1980

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980: 26, repro.

1991

  • Kopper, Philip. America's National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation. New York, 1991: 238, repro.

1992

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 31, repro.

2009

  • Peck, Glenn C. George Bellows' Catalogue Raisonné. H.V. Allison & Co., 2009. Online resource, URL: http://www.hvallison.com. Accessed 16 August 2016.

2012

  • Wolfe, M. Melissa. “Family Life: Portraiture, 1914-1923.” In Charles Brock et al. George Bellows Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington; Metropoiltan Museum of Art, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, 2012-2013. Munich, 2012: 189, color fig. 5.

Inscriptions

lower left: Geo Bellows.

Wikidata ID

Q20192236

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