American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Collection of Charles and Virginia Bowden

Exhibited

"George Bellows: The Personal Side," Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, Georgia, March 16-May 6, 1984.

Literature

Patricia Phagan, George Bellows: The Personal Side, an exhibition catalogue, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, 1984, p. 53 (illustrated).

Note

The present work is included in the online version of the Artist's Catalogue Raisonné available at www.hvallison.com, and will be included in the publication being prepared by Glenn C. Peck. We wish to thank Mr. Peck for his assistance in cataloguing the Lot.

Celebrated for his vigorous depictions of New York City life, George Bellows found inspiration in contemporary events, sport, his family and friends, and in landscapes from Maine to New Mexico. Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, and prodigious in both athletic and artistic talent, Bellows relocated to New York in 1904, matriculating at the New York School of Art alongside Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent. Under the tutelage of Robert Henri, de facto leader of the Ashcan School, Bellows would emerge as one of the most versatile—and experimental—of that group. Although his style was firmly entrenched in realism, his free brushwork, far-reaching subject matter, and facility with color and composition often allied him with modernism, especially at the end of his career.

The present lot is an expansive, well-executed example of Bellows’ late work—a 20 1/2 x 52-inch allegory of youth and the passage of time. Alongside an extensive body of lithographs, he illustrated diverse publications, from periodicals to popular fiction. The Journey of Youth—commissioned to accompany The Wind Bloweth (1922) by Irish author, Donn Byrne—depicts the novel’s adolescent protagonist on a quest for beauty and adventure. Executed near the end of Bellows’ life, when he was just 40 years old (he lived to be 42), the painting represents a nattily-attired young man strolling through an ethereal fantasyland. Hat and baton in hand, the boy is depicted mid-step, subsumed in one of the golden rays descending from the heavens. Trees, quasi-cloud forms and arabesque motifs round out the scene.

Marked by a decorative palette of purple and yellow, a setting reduced to basic geometries and, appropriately, an atmosphere trending toward dream-like, The Journey of Youth boasts many of the hallmarks of Bellows’ late career. What’s more, it bears an affinity to two other mid-1920s masterpieces by the artist: Two Women (1924, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art) and Summer Fantasy (1924, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens). The trio simultaneously recalls the sweeping allegories of the Old Masters and embraces the formal and compositional eccentricities that would come to characterize modernism in American art.