National Gallery of Art

Agnes Maud Murray Thompson Dale (1875–1953) was born in Rochester, New York, the daughter of a compositor for a local newspaper. The Murrays moved to New York City in 1886, and Maud enrolled in the Art Students League in 1893, where she studied with James Carroll Beckwith. She later went to Paris and studied with painter and printmaker Theophile A. Steinlen. In 1898 she married Frederick M. Thompson, a former classmate at the Art Students League who had foregone art for a legal career. In 1899 the couple had a son. Maud divorced Thompson in April 1911, and several weeks later married the stockbroker Chester Dale.

Maud Dale commissioned George Bellows to paint her portrait in the spring of 1919, at the time of his successful solo exhibition at Knoedler & Company. He experienced considerable difficulty with the portrait; Chester Dale recollected that the artist “spent the . . . winter mussing up my drawing room . . . but didn’t seem to get anywhere. . . . I asked him what’s the matter and he said I don’t know Chester, Maud seems to be awfully difficult. I can’t get what I want.”[1]  [1]
Chester Dale autobiography, Chester Dale Papers, Archives of American Art, reel 3969, quoted by M. Melissa Wolfe, “Family Life: Portraiture, 1914–1923,” in Charles Brock et al., George Bellows (Washington, DC, 2012), 189. Bellows struggled with the portrait from April through June and left it unfinished when he went to spend the summer in Middletown, Rhode Island. Bellows briefly resumed work on the painting in August, and finally completed it in October.[2]  [2]
Bellows has listed this portrait in his “Record Book B. of Paintings,” page 162, as “Portrait of Mrs. Chester Dale with Dog.” The artist’s Record Books can be found at The Ohio State University Libraries’ Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the Columbus Museum of Art, OH. Donald Braider relates that the artist “didn’t much like the arrogant, demanding Maud Dale” and was annoyed by her request to include her pet dog in the picture and her insistence that the sittings take place in her apartment at times that were inconvenient to him.[3]  [3]
Donald Braider, George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting (New York, 1971), 119–120.
To make matters worse, the sitter was particularly fond of portraits, which she collected and later described as “documents by which not only the individual but his epoch can be recreated.”[4]  [4]
Maud Dale, “French Art in the Chester Dale Collection,” Art News, Apr. 27, 1929, 55. She openly criticized this first portrait and let it be known that she considered the artist “a bit vulgar, a bit too loud.”[5]  [5]
Charles W. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965), 224–225. Bellows was also dissatisfied with the painting, which he ultimately destroyed.

While Bellows summered in Middletown in 1919, the Dales were vacationing in nearby Newport. In a letter to his former teacher Robert Henri, Bellows reported that “Mrs. Dale, who has been facing me for two months from the model stand has appeared on my trail from Newport.”[6]  [6]
Bellows, July 1919, quoted in Charles W. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965), 225. Maud was determined to have her likeness satisfactorily painted and prevailed upon her husband to commission two new portraits for a total of $3,000. In his records Bellows has listed the first of these, the one now at the Gallery, as Portrait of Mrs. Chester Dale--Purple and Black, and the second as Portrait of Mrs. Dale in Red Coat[fig. 1]   [fig. 1] George Bellows, Mrs. Chester Dale, 1919, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, 1954.[7]  [7]
Bellows, “Record Book B. of Paintings,” 166–167, The Ohio State University Libraries’ Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the Columbus Museum of Art, OH. Both were completed at his Middletown studio that July. Braider notes that neither Bellows nor Maud Dale was satisfied with the two later portraits, and that the artist accepted the fee “because he had given the best part of three months to the various efforts.”[8]  [8]
Donald Braider, George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting (New York, 1971), 120. Bellows nevertheless allowed the final portrait of Maud Dale to be illustrated in “Bellows in Chicago,” Arts & Decoration 12 (Nov. 1919): 10, where it was described as one “of the latest examples of his always growing art.” According to Charles Morgan, Chester Dale was delighted with them, and urged the artist to rework the ill-fated first version.[9]  [9]
Charles W. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965), 225.

Bellows represented Maud Dale, as was often his preference, set against a neutral background and in a three-quarter-length seated format. She leans her right elbow on the back of the chair, clasps her gloved hands together, and glances off to her left. She looks every bit the wealthy, cosmopolitan society woman, attired in a purple and gray satin dress, black shawl, pearl earrings, and black feathered hat. When this portrait was reproduced in color on the cover of Town & Country magazine in 1922, the accompanying caption gave no hint of the friction that had existed between the sitter and the artist: “Mrs. Dale is a great admirer of the work of Mr. Bellows, as is her husband. This admiration has expressed itself to the practical extent of two portraits by this American master of painting and lithography.”[10]  [10]
“The Cover Painting,” Town & Country, May 1, 1922, 24.

As was so often the case with Bellows, his formal, commissioned portraits are noticeably less successful than the portraits he painted of his family, such as the two portraits of his wife (Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Emma in the Black Print, 1919, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and one of his mother (Grandma Bellows, 1919, Oklahoma City Art Museum) that all date from this time.[11]  [11]
On the family portraits, see Melissa Wolfe, “Family Life: Portraiture, 1914–1923,” in Charles Brock et al., George Bellows (Washington, DC, 2012), 187–212. Daniel Catton Rich contrasted Bellows’s “unsuccessful and somewhat ‘official’ portraits of the Dales” with Guy Pène du Bois’s Mr. and Mrs. Chester Dale Dine Out [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Guy Pène du Bois, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Dale Dine Out, 1924, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Chester Dale, 1963. © Estate of Yvonne Pene du Bois McKenney. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY and concluded that “the best of Bellows lies in those strong, simple and almost puritanical portraits where a love of painting and the unconscious bond between sitter and painter triumphed.”[12]  [12]
Daniel Catton Rich, introduction to Charles W. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965), 14. Pène du Bois’s double portrait of the Dales is discussed in Betsy Fahlman, Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life (New York, 2004), 27; a later version of the subject, Café Madrid (1926), is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL. Despite the criticisms leveled at the Gallery’s portrait, it conveys a strong sense of the sitter’s powerful personality, and confirms Morgan’s statement that “very few people, including her husband, argued long with Maud Dale.”[13]  [13]
Charles W. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965), 246.

As Chester’s financial career flourished, the Dales became leading New York socialites, took frequent trips to Europe, and spent their summers in Southampton, Long Island. Maud Dale became interested in late 19th- and early 20th-century French art, and encouraged her husband to become an avid collector. By the mid-1920s the Dales had assembled one of the largest and most important private collections of modern art in the United States.[14]  [14]
See Kimberly A. Jones and Maygene Daniels, The Chester Dale Collection (Washington, DC, 2010). Chester Dale later remarked: “She loved the paintings, I did all the buying.”[15]  [15]
John Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors (Washington, DC, 1969), 162. From 1928 to 1933 Maud took an active role in introducing the American public to modern French art by writing numerous art books, brochures, and articles on the subject. She organized a series of exhibitions at the Museum of French Art at the French Institute in New York, where her husband served on the board of directors.[16]  [16]
See “Brilliant Series of French Shows Due to Mrs. Dale,” Art News, May 28, 1932, 5, 11. The French government recognized these activities by awarding her the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1931. A trained artist, Maud Dale also designed stage sets, painted murals, and designed luxury automobiles. Late in life, suffering from ill health, she became increasingly reclusive before finally succumbing to a heart attack in Southampton in 1953 at the age of 77.[17]  [17]
Biographical information is derived from Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Five, 1951–1955 (New York, 1977), 150–151. Her obituary was published in the New York Times, Aug. 6, 1953.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018