George Bellows (1882-1925) spent part of every year in Woodstock from 1920 to 1924. In all he created over 100 paintings during his time here, and considered the town the perfect combination of nature and neighborhood. He tended to stay late into the summer season or early fall, sometimes alone or with his wife Emma. Previously, the Bellows family had spent summers in coastal Maine, Rhode Island and states out west.
On various occasions in 1910, Bellows visited his close artist friend Eugene Speicher in Woodstock, when Eugene and his new bride Elsie were boarding at the house of Rosie Magee at the northeast corner of Rock City Road and Glasco Turnpike. The artist’s second known destination in the Catskill Mountain region was when he stayed in the fall of 1912 with friends in Onteora Park in Tannersville, about 20 miles north of Woodstock.
In 1920 and 1921, Bellows rented the house of the historian, statesman, professor of history at Columbia University, and long-time seasonal resident James T. Shotwell and his artist wife Margaret. The place, which had beautiful views, was east of the Byrdcliffe art colony on a hillside. It’s Shotwell Road today. Artist Andrew Dasburg noted in a letter of the time that Bellows had gotten a great bargain by only paying $500 rent for such a large and attractive place.
In the summer of 1921, Bellows and his artist friends — Speicher, Robert Henri, and Leon Kroll — provided individual criticisms in an outdoor figure class in Woodstock under the auspices of the Art Students League of New York. Their associate Charles Rosen was a teacher of landscape painting at the school. The catalog announcing the summer program noted that the League had conducted a studio class in the winter months in New York City for the past two years. A class in Woodstock had been suggested. Rosen would “provide out-of-doors criticism on Monday and a Saturday lecture and criticism.” Over the years Kroll had often worked in the area, drawn there in part by his painter sister Jane and musician brother William, both of whom resided for periods in Woodstock or on the Maverick in West Hurley.
In 1922, Bellows purchased land adjacent to his friend Speicher’s home, on the road now known as Bellows Lane near the intersection of Lower Byrdcliffe Road. The house, which remained in the Bellows family until the mid-1960s, was designed by Bellows with the aid of Jay Hambridge’s system of Dynamic Symmetry.
The family rented a house in the village while their new home was under construction. Bellows built the house himself with the assistance of the artist John Carroll, whose portrait he painted and exhibited at the Woodstock Art Association in 1923.
Bellows is pictured at work on his property in a humorous crayon drawing by Woodstock illustrator and painter John H. Striebel. The drawing also features other local artists busy at their personal or after-hours pursuits.
Bellows’ studio was just a few steps away from the house, one of a group of studios in the vicinity rented out by the Simmons family. The structure eventually became a private house, and burned down about 2003, when it was replaced by a modular home.
The Bellows home had a stone swimming pool, but no refrigerator or icebox. During the time that Bellows and his family lived there, he and his wife Emma utilized the brook running in back to keep their food chilled.
During World War II, Emma Bellows built a storage shed close to the house. She was fearful of New York City comIng under attack, and moved her husband’s artworks into the storage space, adding a steel door culled from the former post office in the village which had a complex lock system.
During his time in Woodstock, Bellows forged a collegial link between the older established artists and the younger artists who had made their way to the town. He was a popular figure in Woodstock, and his sudden death in New York City in early 1925 was a terrible blow to his friends in the area. Bellows participated in various organizations and special events, making quick sketches for a dollar at the annual library fair, captaining and playing first base on the Woodstock baseball team, teaching children how to swim, and becoming an early active member of the Woodstock Art Association, where he served on the exhibition review committee, and occasionally as an auctioneer.
Bellows helped pull together key business interests to help form the Woodstock Athletic Club. At the Maverick Festival he narrated Hervey White’s adaption of a play by Flaubert. The first time he presided at a public meeting, he reportedly picked up a baseball bat and brought it down on the table “and told everybody that if they did not make less noise they might go to the devil.”
In recent years, there has been increasing interest among museums, galleries, collectors and scholars in Bellows’ work postdating the years 1908 to 1915, the period of his best-known pictures of New York City. Bellows may have been generally thought of as a painter of the urban environment, including the people of the city and its boxing arenas, but he was engaged and interested in landscape painting over the full course of his career. Following the Armory Show of 1913, landscape painting became a primary endeavor for him.
Speicher, Bellows and Rosen would go out together on sketching excursions in the Woodstock area, packing up Bellows’ car for the occasion. Bellows hitched a narrow wheelbarrow to the running board of the car. Once the group decided where they would stop, they would go in three separate directions with their easels and equipment. Bellows trundled the wheelbarrow up and down the area until he selected what he wanted to sketch. The artist only needed a few moments to open his sketch box, set up his canvas against two posts, and begin to paint the area’s landscape
Bellows would sometimes work out his compositions on paper before tackling oil. During his first summer in Woodstock, he took special interest in depicting the deserted farms and rundown ruins of old farmhouses which had recently begun to appear in greater number in the area, caused by a combination of economic factors, including the increased stream of artists and city people who purchased local property.
Bellows imbued many of his Woodstock landscapes with a dark, gothic mood of mystery and gloom. The times were changing, and he knew the area would never again be the farming paradise it was when the first artists and craftsmen arrived at Byrdcliffe during the first years of the century.
“Many fields, especially those close to Woodstock, ceased being tilled or pastured as the value for building sites rose,” historian Alf Evers noted. “Brush was taking the place of rye, oats and corn . . . and mountain laurel expanded into conspicuous groups on hillside pastures in Wittenberg, Lake Hill and Shady.”
Following the Armory Show of 1913, Bellows’ interest in color theory deepened, and he adopted the system originated by Hardesty Maratta as his model to achieve a pure, fresh and often arbitrary selection of color. Over the course of the period 1914 to 1919, Bellows’ brushwork and handling of light and color grew more dramatic and expressionistic, and this change continued during his time in Woodstock. In a letter written to his former teacher Robert Henri during the course of his first summer in the town, he referred to Andrew Dasburg and Henry Lee McFee as the “kings” of the Woodstock art scene, acknowledging their leadership role along with that of Konrad Cramer in regard to artistic experimentation. The trio may have prodded him to take new chances of his own.
The Picnic ranks among Bellows’ finest and most venturesome landscapes. The painting features a view of Cooper Lake in Bearsviile, one of the most beautiful, charming and inspiring spots in the area. In 1896 this natural lake became part of the water system of Kingston. A new dam was built in order to boost the lake’s storage capacity. Over the course of 1920 to 1927, the Cooper Lake dam was raised three times to allow for more intake of water from its source, a Mink Hollow stream.
In Bellows’ painting the lake looks almost otherworldly, as he combined elements of realism, fantasy and abstraction, including geometrically shaped outcroppings that appear to have been grafted from studies he had painted on trips to Maine and California.
Bellows’ color is bold, vivid and exaggerated. The lake seems to exist in a state of supernatural serenity upon whose surface float reflections of the surrounding cone-shaped hills. Amidst this site of the real and unreal, his wife Emma lays out food, Bellows fishes, their two daughters play, and Eugene Speicher takes a nap.
My House Woodstock ranks as one of Bellows most striking works in terms of color. The canvas was painted near the end of Bellows’ final stay in the area. His house appears in the midst of vivid red and orange hues, and the cobalt blue shadow of Overlook Mountain. Overhead traces of bright white clouds linger in the brilliant blue sky.
Bellows also worked in Saugerties and Eddyville (near Rondout in Kingston), and exhibited at least one of his local landscapes at the Woodstock Art Association — Old Farmyard, Toodleums — now in the collection of Bank of America. Upon its exhibition in 1922, a reviewer felt that the scene’s fragmented handling of space, quivering treatment of light, and bold arbitrary color seemed “to be a curtsy to the new [modern] school.” The folk name, now Toodlum, came from a story of a drunk on his way home who was stopped by one of the local constabulary and asked where he was going. “Toodleum he said, trying to say Unionville (his home hamlet) . . . . He turned it into a sing-songy ditty, Toodlee Toodleum Toodllee-um-um and started to sing it [to the police officer].”
Hudson Valley historian Vernon Benjamin pointed out to me that the barn still exists, and was once part of the seventh-generation Snyder farm in Saugerties.
Bellows was a regular exhibitor at the Woodstock Art Association. Among the figurative works that he showed were Lady Jean and Nude with White Shawl. The latter work had been the subject of controversy in early 1922, when it was displayed at the annual prize exhibition of paintings and sculpture at the National Arts Club in New York City. A group of club members complained that the work was immoral.
The reporter for The New York Times related that the “… painting represents a young woman seated. A black silk gown covers the lower part of the body, but above the waist she is nude except for an airy white shawl that gently caresses her shoulders and arms. The face is attractive. Her straight black hair is parted in the middle and done up in a puritanical topknot. An artist who sympathizes with Mr. Bellows’s work said yesterday that there would have been no objection had Mr. Bellows painted an entire nude; that the trouble seemed to be that he had painted a décollete gown and cut it too long.”
The work does not appear to have ruffled feathers when it was on view in Woodstock at the end of the summer. One reviewer noted that the painting looked “sane and mellow in its present context,”
surrounded as it was by many works of the more modern school.
Some of Bellows finest late portraits and figure paintings date from his time in Woodstock. Anne in White was created during the Bellows family’s first summer at the Shotwell house. The Catskill Mountain landscape is visible through the open window at the upper right.
His portrait of Katherine Rosen features his artist friend Charles Rosen’s daughter, theatrically posed in a bodice and fanciful skirt. She wears jewelry that was borrowed for the occasion from Elsie Speicher. The July 21, 1923 issue of the satirical Woodstock magazine The Hue and Cry contains a comical text under the title “Studio Slaps”: “Says George Bellows/To Charles Rosen/Lend me your daughter to do some posin’? Says Charles Rosen to George Bellows/Sure for a match and two chrome yellows.”
Mr. and Mrs. Philip Ware dates from 1924, and features two dignified Woodstock residents who did odd jobs in the area (including cleaning neighbors’ homes), sitting on a Victorian sofa. In the 1930s the painting was spoken of in the same breath as Grant Wood’s American Gothic as a forerunner of American Scene Painting of that decade.
The gothic mood witnessed in many of Bellows’ landscape paintings permeates the interior, which seems haunted by loss, aging and the passage of time
In spite of this mood, the portrait of the Wares, as well as those of the 1920s by Speicher, which feature the general citizenry of Woodstock, convey an arresting sense of the inner strength and steadfast temperament of the rural population of America in the decades between the two world wars. These works look ahead to developments in American art in the 1930s, particularly American Scene Painting and Regionalism, and hint at the art colony’s pioneering role in promulgating a new vision in the 1920s for the art of the nation.
Two Women (Sacred and Profane Love) is one of the more mysterious of Bellows’ figure paintings. The interior appears to be modeled on that of Bellows’ Woodstock house, The art historian Marjorie B. Searl has noted his interest at the time in developing “a narrative about love and loss that expressed [his] deeply felt emotions as he came to terms with the tensions and bonds of youth and age, parent and child, the erotic and the profane.”
During the summer of 1924, Bellows complained of abdominal pain. A local doctor recognized that it was acute appendicitis, and advised that the artist to have surgery immediately upon his return to New York. The autumn was a very busy period for Bellows, and he neglected to undertake the surgery.
In early January his appendix ruptured, and a week later he was dead. The pallbearers at his funeral in New York included the Woodstockers Speicher, Rosen, McFee, and Bolton Brown. The Woodstock artist Frank Swift Chase was one of the ushers.
Art historian Bruce Weber has been active for the last several years as a researcher, lecturer, writer and curator on the historic Woodstock art colony, and produces the website Learning Woodstock Art Colony. Dr. Weber is the curator of the exhibition “Grant Arnold and the Golden Era of Woodstock Lithography, 1930-1940,” on view from October 14th to December 9th at the Woodstock School of Art at 2470 Route 212 east of the hamlet.
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