George Bellows was attracted to sporting themes as subjects for his paintings in part because he was an outstanding athlete. Although he was best known for his representations of boxing—a violent, popular activity associated with the working class—he also turned to the patrician sports of polo and tennis. Bellows was well aware that sports had strong social implications. In April 1910, not long after completing the third of his early prizefighting pictures, he spent some time in Lakewood, New Jersey, in his own words, “making studies of the wealthy game of polo as played by the ultra rich.” A decade later, he took a similar interest in representing the genteel game of tennis, a sport in which, unlike boxing and polo, Bellows participated. His biographer Charles H. Morgan reported that while in Manhattan during the summer of 1921, “at frequent and regular intervals, tall George and Gene Speicher would take on small Leon Kroll and William Glackens in spirited doubles matches on the excellent courts at Ninetieth Street and Park Avenue."
The artist and his family spent the summer of 1919 in Middleton, Rhode Island, from where he made frequent visits to nearby Newport to work on a portrait of Maud Dale, wife of his patron Chester Dale. One of the attractions of the affluent and fashionable resort town was the tennis tournaments that were held at the Newport Casino, a building that had been designed by the noted New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White for the wealthy journalist James Gordon Bennett in 1879. After Bennett sold the building to the Newport Casino Association in 1880, it served as a “commodious place of summer meeting and amusement for fashionable society.” The first US National Championship was held on its grounds in 1881, and the building now houses the International Tennis Hall of Fame. From 1915 to 1967, the annual Newport Casino Invitational, in which famous nationally ranked players such as Bill Johnston and Bill Tilden participated, took place there. J. Carter Brown noted that Bellows may have been inspired by seeing such tennis stars as “California Comet” Maurice Evans McLoughlin, whose “forceful style of play . . . made the game seem more and more a real, red-blooded sport.”
In August 1919 Bellows painted two views of a tournament being played on courts at the Newport Casino—Tennis Tournament (Tennis at Newport) [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] George Bellows, Tennis Tournament (Tennis at Newport), 1919, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967 and The Tournament [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] George Bellows, The Tournament, 1919, oil on canvas, private collection. Bellows then completed two lithographs in March 1920, Tennis [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] George Bellows, Tennis, 1920, lithograph on chine collé, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.92 and The Tournament [fig. 4]
[fig. 4] George Bellows, The Tournament, 1920, lithograph on chine collé, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation, 2008.115.12. Glenn Peck has noted, “Both lithographs are fresh and successful attempts at resolving the issues of perspective that hampered the earlier efforts in the oil paintings.”
Shortly after, Bellows worked on two additional paintings whose compositions were derived from the lithographs: Tennis at Newport [fig. 5]
[fig. 5] George Bellows, Tennis at Newport, 1920, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, The James W. and Frances Gibson McGlothlin Collection, 2017.155 based on The Tournament and the Gallery’s larger, apparently unfinished Tennis Tournament after Tennis. Tennis at Newport was completed in March and is very similar to its source. In June Bellows entered in his record book Tennis Tournament, which offers a somewhat modified, simpler version of its corresponding lithograph. In the print, the viewpoint is past the court’s centerline closer to the spectators, a second player is present (thus transforming the match into a doubles game), and there are fewer figures on the other side of the net at the far left.
Both of the 1920 tennis paintings present bird’s-eye lateral views of matches that were held on the grass courts inside the larger of the Newport Casino’s two quadrangles. Their titles indicate what aspect of the event Bellows wanted to emphasize in each. Tennis at Newport shows a doubles match seen from the left half of the court looking toward the arcaded facade of the Casino building, with spectators assembled along the foreground. It is clearly more a depiction of a social event than a tennis game. Much like the earlier Crowd at the Polo Game (1910, private collection), its primary interest is in observing the genteel, well-dressed crowd watching the match.
The Gallery’s Tennis Tournament represents a singles game seen from the right side of the court. The emphasis is on tennis, with the player standing over the baseline in the lower-right foreground, in the act of delivering an overhand smash to his opponent. Bellows moved the point of view up to the sideline so that only the spectators on the opposite side of the court are visible. He still devoted attention to the observers, contrasting their elegant, languid poses to the athletic gesture of the player.
Bellows’s tennis paintings employ Jay Hambidge’s theory of dynamic symmetry, a system of proportions Bellows found useful in designing complex, multifigure paintings and lithographs from early 1918 until his untimely death in January 1925. These works also share a greatly simplified scale of color gradations and values that reflect the artist’s interest in the revised theories that Denman Ross had recently published in The Painter’s Palette (1919). In the Gallery’s painting, the emphasis on the chalk lines that delineate the court enhances the impression that the composition is composed of a series of receding horizontal bands that systematically progress from the foreground to the background, zoning off the playing area, the line of spectators, the trees, the architecture, and the sky. The sun is partially obscured by clouds, but prominent shadows are cast forward across the court. Evidently Tennis at Newport was set at a different time of day because the shadows fall in the opposite direction.
In tandem with his many treatments of the subject, the variety and richness of Bellows’s painterly allusions to the works of other painters in Tennis Tournament reflect his ambition to bring as much knowledge and skill as possible to his depictions of contemporary life. The exaggerated use of perspective and shadow to enhance the composition’s dramatic content is reminiscent of a device commonly employed by 16th-century Venetian masters like Jacopo Tintoretto (Venetian, 1518 or 1519 - 1594), as seen in his Removal of the Body of St. Mark (1562–1566, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice). David Curry detected the influence of El Greco (Greek, 1541 - 1614): “Under troubled skies recalling Spanish Toledo as much as any American summer retreat, individual figures and groups strike poses conjuring elements of social performance.” Finally, Carol Clark and Allen Guttmann have suggested that Bellows borrowed the figure of the man who reclines on the grass at the right from Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
Robert Torchia
July 24, 2024
