In this richly colored, broadly rendered, full-length portrait, six-year-old Anne Bellows stands on a mauve carpet holding an open Japanese parasol in her right hand and a small purse in her left. She looks forthrightly at the viewer with her wide-set blue-gray eyes. Anne is posed against a blue background, and a green curtain hangs at the right. The purple flowers at her left may signify the freshness of youth. Anne with a Japanese Parasol was completed in September 1917 in Camden, Maine, where the Bellows family summered. In his Record Book, Bellows, apparently in error since no leaves are shown, assigned the painting the subtitle Autumn Leaves and Purple.
The previous year Bellows had painted Anne with Her Parasol (1916, private collection), in which he represented his daughter, this time seated in a chair, clasping the handle of a closed parasol with both hands. The painting’s title indicates that the parasol was not merely a studio prop but a personal possession that Anne herself actually used. In contrast, the decorative, more sophisticated type featured open on the floor in Anne with a Japanese Parasol may suggest that Anne’s imagination and self-awareness were expanding—that she was growing up. Parasols, especially Japanese ones, were fashionable accessories for well-to-do women during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They frequently appear in paintings by the French impressionists, for example Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, and their American counterparts, most notably Frederick Frieseke. Bellows would have been aware of these precedents. His ongoing interest in the decorative qualities of Japanese objects was again evident in his next portrait of his daughter, Anne in White (1920, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA), which features a brightly colored and patterned fan.
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. Over the last half of his abbreviated career Bellows’s depictions of women came to rival, in both their variety and scope, his more famous boxing scenes. That ambition is apparent in the range of images he devoted to Anne, from My Baby in October 1912 (private collection) to the brilliant family portrait Emma and Her Children (1923, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), completed just over a year before Bellows’s premature death at the age of 42 in 1925.
Robert Torchia
August 17, 2018
