1918

The Bellows Class

American, 1895 - 1987

Several of Peggy Bacon's early drypoints capture events from her days at the Art Students League in New York. In this work she recreates a portraiture class she took with George Bellows (1882-1925), an American realist artist who adopted the dark palette and loose brushwork associated with the Ashcan School in his depictions of urban life. Bellows stands in the center with a weary countenance. His appearance reveals Bacon's own attitude toward his instruction, which she found "uniformly absurd" because of his insistence on rigid and exacting use of color and dynamic proportion.