Nude with Red Hair

1920

George Bellows

Painter, American, 1882 - 1925

George Bellows

Shown from the knees up, a woman sits partially covered by a black cloth as she holds one forearm across her bare breasts in this vertical painting. The woman has pale, yellow-tinged skin and long, copper-red hair and bangs. Her body faces us, but she turns her head to look off to our right with large blue, wide-set eyes. Her cheeks are flushed, and her full, dark pink lips are closed. A strand of gradually larger amber-yellow beads hangs around her neck, and she wears a gold-colored bracelet on the arm braced across her chest, her left arm, to our right. Glimpses of pale pink nipples are visible. The voluminous black cloth drapes down over one shoulder and across her hips. She wears a ring on the other hand, which emerges from the cloth to rest on that knee. Piles of garnet red, peridot green, and forest green are piled up to chest height behind her, and the background is nickel gray around her body and darkens to black around the top and side edges. The scene is loosely painted, especially in the fabric and background. The artist signed the canvas in the lower left corner, “Geo. Bellows E.S.B.”

Media Options

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Nude with Red Hair is one of two nude subjects that Bellows painted in his rural Woodstock, New York, studio in July 1920. The model has been identified as Agnes Tait, a young art student who was attending the Art Students League’s summer school in Woodstock. Both the figure’s pose, modestly covering her breasts with her raised left forearm and hand, and the use of light are strongly reminiscent of Titian’s famous Venus with a Mirror, which Bellows may have known through a reproduction or one of the numerous copies or variants after it.

Bellows’s awareness of the importance of life drawing and old master precedents can be traced to his education with Robert Henri and remained in evidence throughout his career. Art historians have generally neglected George Bellows’s nude compositions despite the fact that they represent a significant part of his oeuvre. As early as 1905 Bellows had received recognition for his skill in life drawing as a student at the New York School of Art, and by 1910 he was teaching life classes at the Art Students League. Among his final major paintings are Nude with Hexagonal Quilt and Two Women (1924, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas), which is based on another famous painting by Titian: Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1515, Galleria Borghese, Rome). These last nudes depicting women shuttered away from the outside world in Bellows’s Woodstock studio stand in stark contrast to the public spectacles featured in his early, aggressively masculine boxing scenes.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 110.9 x 86.5 cm (43 11/16 x 34 1/16 in.)
    framed: 138.4 x 113 x 7.6 cm (54 1/2 x 44 1/2 x 3 in.)

  • Accession Number

    1963.10.84

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Nude with Red Hair, 1920

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

The artist [1882-1925]; by inheritance to his wife, Emma S. Bellows [1884-1959]; purchased May 1945 through (H.V. Allison & Co., New York) by Chester Dale [1883-1962], New York; bequest 1963 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1926

  • Forty-Sixth Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, Providence Art Club, Rhode Island, 1926, no. 1, repro., as Woman with Red Hair.

1944

  • Paintings by George Bellows, H.V. Allison & Co., New York, 1944, unnumbered checklist, cover repro.

1957

  • George Bellows: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January-February 1957, no. 46, repro.

  • Paintings by George Bellows, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio, March-April 1957, no. 49.

1965

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

Bibliography

1929

  • Bellows, Emma Louise Story. The Paintings of George Bellows. New York, 1929: 102.

1965

  • Paintings other than French in the Chester Dale Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 51, repro.

  • Morgan, Charles H. George Bellows. Painter of America. New York, 1965: 238.

1970

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

1973

  • Young, Mahonri Sharp. The Eight. New York, 1973: 44, color pl. 55.

1974

  • Gerdts, William H. The Great American Nude: A History in Art. New York, 1974: 162.

1980

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980: 27, repro.

1981

  • Williams, William James. A Heritage of American Paintings from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1981: repro. 203, 205.

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.

Inscriptions

by Emma S. Bellows, lower left: Geo. Bellows / E. S. B.[1]

Wikidata ID

Q20192309

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