George Bellows
In the early 20th century, George Bellows passed up a career in professional baseball in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to pursue a career as a professional artist in New York. Bellows worked as an illustrator for many top magazines and also created a number of original paintings and lithographs. Through the years, he successfully incorporated his passion for sports into his art, creating vigorous, athletic compositions that reflected life in New York with remarkable candor. His brushwork revealed grimy city streets and urban scenes.
Bellows was born in Columbus in 1882, attended Ohio State University and played semipro baseball. It was in college that he began to develop his artistic hand. While playing baseball and basketball, he also allowed time to do illustrations for his college newspaper. He found art interesting and exciting, and ultimately decided it would be a better choice than athletics. Bellows dropped out of Ohio State University in 1904 with the intention of becoming an illustrator in New York.
He moved to New York in 1904 and enrolled in the New York School of Art, where he studied with Robert Henri. Both Bellows and Henry were members of the Ashcan school, named for its interest in depicting commonplace, often sordid, urban subjects. Like others of the Ashcan school, Bellows was known for the honesty of his approach, born of direct observation of the world around him.
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