Tennis Tournament

1920

George Bellows

Painter, American, 1882 - 1925

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George Bellows was an outstanding athlete and knowledgeable about sports. Although he was best known for his boxing pictures—a violent, popular, working-class subject—he also turned to the patrician sporting worlds of polo and tennis. He was particularly familiar with the nuances of tennis, which he often played with fellow artists such as Leon Kroll and William Glackens.

In 1919 Bellows and his family summered in Middleton, Rhode Island, close to the wealthy resort town of Newport. Major tennis tournaments were held at the Newport Casino, a building that had been designed by the New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Bellows made studies of tennis players and by March of the following year had painted Tennis at Newport (1920, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In June he entered the larger, if seemingly unfinished Tennis Tournament in his record book. Both of these closely related compositions consist of bird’s-eye lateral views of tennis matches at Newport and reflect the influence of Jay Hambidge’s theory of dynamic symmetry as well as the color theories that Denman Ross had recently published in The Painter’s Palette (1919).

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Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

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

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Tennis Tournament, 1920

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist [1882-1925]; by inheritance to his wife, Emma S. Bellows [1884-1959]; her estate; purchased July 1969 through (H.V. Allison & Co., New York) by Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia; gift 1983 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1969

  • George Bellows, H.V. Allison & Co., New York, 1969, no. 7, cover repro.

1986

  • Gifts to the Nation: Selected Acquisitions from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1986, unnumbered checklist, repro.

1991

  • Sport in Art from American Museums, The National Art Museum of Sport [inaugural exhibition], Indianapolis; Phoenix Art Museum; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York, 1991-1992, no. 36, repro.

2000

  • George Bellows in Newport and Beyond, Newport Art Museum, 2000.

2012

  • George Bellows, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2012-2013, pl. 45 (shown only in New York).

Bibliography

1971

  • Braider, Donald. George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting. New York, 1971: 121.

1973

  • Young, Mahonri Sharp. The Eight. New York, 1973: 126, color pl. 53.

1988

  • Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. Rev. ed. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988: 20, repro.

1991

  • Rhodes, Reilly, ed. Sport in Art from American Museums. Exh. cat. The National Museum of Sport, New York, 1991: no. 36.

1992

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 32, repro.

1995

  • Clark, Carol, and Allen Guttmann. "Artists and Athletes." Journal of Sports History 22 (Summer 1995): 105-107, repro.

2009

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

Wikidata ID

Q20192336

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