Anne with a Japanese Parasol

1917

George Bellows

Painter, American, 1882 - 1925

George Bellows

Media Options

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Though George Bellows established his fame by capturing the almost entirely male world of New York’s boxing clubs, he spent the second half of his career surrounded by and frequently painting women. After his marriage to Emma Story in 1910 and the births of their two daughters, Anne and Jean, he lived in an all-female household that often included his Aunt Elinor and his mother, Anna. Bellows’s depictions of women came to rival, in both their variety and ambition, his more famous boxing scenes.

Among the most successful of Bellows’s many portraits of his family are those of his eldest daughter, Anne, which he painted from her infancy until September 1923, a little over a year before his premature death in January 1925. Anne with a Japanese Parasol was completed in Camden, Maine, in September 1917, when Anne was six years old. The previous year Bellows had represented his daughter holding a plainer, more generic closed parasol in Anne with Her Parasol (1916, private collection). Open on the floor, the decorative, more sophisticated type featured in Anne with a Japanese Parasol was a popular fashion accessory among upper-class women during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It may have been meant to evoke Anne’s burgeoning imagination and self-awareness.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

  • Dimensions

    overall: 150.1 x 91.7 cm (59 1/8 x 36 1/8 in.)
    framed: 168.9 x 111.8 x 6.4 cm (66 1/2 x 44 x 2 1/2 in.)

  • Accession Number

    1983.1.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Anne with a Japanese Parasol, 1917

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]; her estate; purchased June 1964 through (H.V. Allison & Co., New York) by Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia; gift 1983 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1917

  • Hill Tollerton, San Francisco, 1917 [a commercial gallery, according to the artist's Record Book].

  • Carson, Pirie and Scott Gallery, Chicago, 1917 [a commercial gallery, according to the artist's Record Book].

  • Oakland Art Museum, California, 1917 [according to the artist's Record Book].

1918

  • Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, Gallery of Fine Arts and Art Association of Columbus, Ohio, January-February 1918, no. 4, as Anne.

  • Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition of American Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, May-July 1918, no. 32, as Anne.

1919

  • Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, M. Knoedler & Co., New York, March-April 1919, no. 2 or no. 18, as Anne.

  • An Exhibition of Oil Paintings by George Bellows, N.A. and Mural Paintings and Drawings by Violet Oakley, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, December 1919, no. 11.

  • Paintings by George Bellows, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, September-October 1919, no. 11.

  • Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1919 [according to the artist's Record Book].

  • Paintings by George Bellows, Art Institute of Chicago, November-December 1919, no. 11.

  • Thirteenth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists and a Group of Small Selected Bronzes by American Sculptors, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, May-September 1919, no. 2, repro., as Portrait of Anne.

  • Springfield, Illinois, 1919 [according to the artist's Record Book].

1920

  • The Twenty-Second Annual Exhibition of Paintings by American Artists, The Art Club of Erie at the Public Library, Erie, Pennsylvania, 1920, no. 11 [incorrectly listed as 1919 in the artist's Record Book].

1942

  • Paintings by George Bellows, H.V. Allison & Co., New York, 1942, unnumbered checklist, as Anne with a Parasol.

1962

  • George Bellows, H.V. Allison & Co., New York, 1962, no. 13.

1964

  • George Bellows, H.V. Allison & Co., New York, 1964, no. 11.

1986

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

Bibliography

1929

  • Bellows, Emma Louise Story. The Paintings of George Bellows. New York, 1929: 72, repro.

1965

  • Morgan, Charles H. George Bellows. Painter of America. New York, 1965: 203, 234, 258-259.

1971

  • Braider, Donald. George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting. New York, 1971: 124, 133-134.

1992

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

  • Quick, Michael, Jane Myers, Marianne Doezema, and Franklin Kelly. The Paintings of George Bellows. Exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, 1992-1993. New York, 1992: 213-214, repro, fig. 40.

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

lower right in red: Geo Bellows; upper left in dark blue: Geo Bellows

Wikidata ID

Q20192067

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