The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library

Since his death in 1925, the country’s most significant collections of American painting have granted George Bellows a place among their most important artists. Best known for a relatively small number of controversial boxing images, he is equally notable for his contributions to American landscape painting, portraiture, and especially scenes of modern American life. Although his talent is most directly evident in his drawings, until now they have been paid only cursory attention.

The Powerful Hand of George Bellows features drawings and related lithographs by the great American realist George Bellows. It describes for the first time the ingenious combinations of graphic media Bellows used to create them. It also details the circumstances under which he made them and the specifics of his active career as a commercial artist and cartoonist underlying his more celebrated role as a painter. Recorded in these drawings is a new understanding of the meteoric course along which his talents carried him.