Collection Spotlight: August, 2024

Green Sea

George Bellows (American, 1882–1925), 1913
Oil on canvas, 13″ x 19.5”

Gift of the Weyerhaeuser Family

American artist George Bellows first visited the summer destination of Monhegan, Maine, in 1911, at the invitation of American artist Robert Henri (1865–1929). He returned there each summer between 1911 and 1916, having become enthralled with the rocky coastline and sprawling vistas of the island. These scenes, along with the powerful energy of the ocean, inspired Bellows to create over one hundred paintings in the four months he spent there in 1913, with his wife Emma and their two-year-old daughter Anne. This summer was the most productive time in the artist’s career.

Henri visited the island for the first time in 1903, and soon introduced many artists to the active art colony there. With Henri’s arrival came a marked increase in visitation, unlike any other time in Monhegan’s history. By the time Henri visited the islands, he had become the most important art instructor in America, and leader of the New American Realists movement.[i] Henri’s circle of students included Bellows, Rockwell Kent, William Trost Richards, Alice Swett, and Maud Briggs Knowlton, as well as other members of The Eight and the Ashcan School. Regardless of their preferred subject matter, all of the artists who came to the island were inspired to create dynamic, immediate land and seascapes.[ii]

Traditionally known as a painter of gritty urban scenes, George Bellows’ oeuvre also included lesser-known seascapes and landscapes. Bellows also painted canvases of the Hudson River, in New York between 1908 and 1911, that showed its industrialization. The expressive brush strokes and sense of immediacy in Green Sea were the result of having been painted en plein air, or outdoors, a term coined by British artist John Constable (1776–1837). This approach was fundamental to Impressionism and other schools that painted outdoors, with the advent of pre-mixed paints in portable tubes.

Bellows painted this seascape, Green Sea, while staying on Monhegan Island the summer after successfully installing the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which featured several of his own paintings. Compared to the artwork Bellows completed on Monhegan Island in 1911, which included tidy compositions and sprawling vistas, the paintings of 1913 were intimate views of crashing, swelling waves.

The high horizon line in Green Sea emphasized the magnitude of the tumultuous waves, rendered with bold strokes of blue-green and blue-violet, mixed right on the canvas. When the painting underwent conservation, evidence of sea spray and salt were discovered in the pigment, indicating that the artist worked in close proximity to the ocean. The decision was made to leave the salt in place to confirm the painting’s authenticity and provenance.

Bellows had the frames for his paintings carved by Maurice Grieve, a master woodcarver and framer in New York City. Frame historian, Susan Smeaton, who studied the frames of the Ashcan School painters, confirmed that Bellows favored one particular frame style. It became known as the “Bellows frame,” and included hand-carved, gradated, parallel lines.[iii] Each frame was either gilded or hand-colored with paint, and textured through the use of dry brushing. A note, written in chalk on the back of the frame for Green Sea, indicates that the artist requested the frame be finished “in a lighter gray like other examples.”

[i] Danly, Susan, Side By Side on Monhegan: The Henri Circle of the American Impressionists, Monhegan Museum, Monhegain Island, Maine, 2004. Pg. 3.

[ii] Danly, pg. 3.

[iii] Smeaton, Suzanne, Framing George Bellows, Ashcan Artist, the frame blog.com, June 15, 2013,  https://theframeblog.com/2013/06/15/framing-george-bellows-ashcan-artist/maurice-grieve-sm/

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