GENERAL DESCRIPTION
A member of the Eight, or Ashcan school, and best known for his boxing scenes, George Bellows also produced moving portraits, as seen here. During the early 1920s, Bellows was preoccupied with the depiction of his wife. Towards the end of his life, Bellows treated his every day subjects in a simple, large, and monumental way. This portrait of George Bellows' wife, Emma Story, took over three years to produce and involved just as much dramatic struggle as the artist's well-known fight scenes. Emma in a Purple Dress is characteristic of Bellows's family portraits, in which the obvious affection he holds for his wife and children is balanced by an ambiguous sense of reserve.
Emma Bellows recalled her husband's terrific struggle to paint her face, as he scraped out each successive effort to capture her character as well as her likeness. He did not flatter Emma, or her elaborate dress, which Bellows liked for its textures. In the finished painting, Emma's eyes are cast to one side, her gaze distant. The light falling on Emma's face softens the resolute frontality of the composition, while in her averted gaze may be read the tedium of innumerable sittings.
A drawing in the museum's collection (1960.124) indicates the relative ease with which the artist handled the dress, but the paper ends at Emma's neck. Starting in 1921 and continuing for the three years he labored on the large portrait, Bellows executed lithographs which depict his wife in the same setting and attire, but experiment with different compositions. (1960.125)
Adapted from
- William Keyse Rudolph, DMA Label copy (1956.58), August 2005.
- P.F.R, DMA research document (1956.58), n.d. Collection Records Object File.
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, DMA Label copy (1956.58), August 1993.
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, "George Bellows, 'Emma in a Purple Dress'" in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Charles Venable (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1997), 249.
NOTES
Removed TMS object tag because rule exists.
Changed artist name in TMS in accordance with preferred name in Getty ULAN- George Wesley Bellows. Completed biographical geographic locations in TMS and added Woodstock as a "work location."
Completed citations for current text entries from 1997 Guide and 1983 selected works. Added text entries for the 2012 guide text and all texts found in education files.
Added published references.
Moved two passages from Curatorial Remarks and entered them as separate text entries. [Sue asked if I removed her curatorial remark regarding the frame. After reviewing the audit trail, it became clear that Brian had moved the framing remark to the media record for a photograph of the frame, and I had moved two interpretive texts into text entries. Sue replaced her frame comment with a new curatorial remark. 3/28/2016)
Add object number to Piction assets-- and eventually to the exhibitions listed below.
Exhibition history--
I made several additions (listed below as part of this Notes field). If my additions to the exhibition history text entry field do not make sense--There are three memorial exhibitions of the work of GB listed in the exhibitions module for this object, but they have minimal identifying data and I can't distinguish which of these exhibitions may already be in TMS. I entered the most detailed information on the early exhibitions that I could assemble from auction records and other museum's online collections.
I removed the following exhibition from exhibition history because the evidence suggests that it was not the same object. I added an equivalent note to the bibliographic entry for this catalogue. 1921: "Second Annual Exhibition of American and European Art," Dallas Art Association, Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, TX, April 7 to April 21, 1921 This catalogue lists "Emma in Purple" as no. 7. This is most likely not the same painting as "Emma in a Purple Dress" because it was incomplete until 1923. The 1921 exhibition may have included the alternate version of this portrait, now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1925: Chicago, IL [1]
1925: Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, NY [2]
1925: "Memorial Exhibition of the Work of George Bellows," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, October 12- November 22, 1925, pp. 30, 91, no. 53, illus. on p. 91
1925: "Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows," The Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, December 1925, n.p., no. 19 [3]
1925-1926: "Memorial Exhibition of the Work of George Bellows," Worcester, MA [4]
1926: "Memorial Exhibition of the Works of George Bellows," The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, January 10- February 10, 1926, p. 11, no. 21
1958: "Famous Paintings and Famous Painters, " Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, October 4- November 2, 1958, no. 10.
[1] This exhibition is listed in the artist's record book without an exhibition title or dates. This line may refer to, "Special Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, Leon Kroll, Eugene F. Savage, Walter Ufer, Paul Bartlett, Edgar S. Cameron, H. Amiard Oberteuffer and George Obertwuffer," Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, December 23, 1924-January 25, 1925. These dates correspond to the abbreviated exhibition history provided on the object page in H.V. Allison & Co. catagloue raisonné online (http://hvallison.com/WorkDetail.aspx?w=136&b=http%3A//hvallison.com/collection.aspx%3Fc%3D63%26si%3D0). Additional documentation is needed.
[2] Unknown exhibition listed in artist's record book. Additional documentation is needed.
[3] According to the exhibition history listed on the National Gallery of Art's online collection for Bellows' "New York" (1911), this exhibition traveled to six venues, including Denver, and probably Buffalo, NY.
[4] A Christie's auction record (December 5, 2002) for Bellows' "Gramercy Park," includes the following information, "Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows," Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, February 22- March 8, 1925.
Emma S. Bellows added as the depicted individual in TMS.
TMS additions or revisions that could be made in the future--
Six additional bibliographic entries are listed on an undated research document by P.F.R and could be entered into TMS for this object and the two related works on paper.
An additional seven exhibitions are listed on the online catalogue raisonné entry for this work. I marked these exhibitions on a hard copy of the catalogue entry that is in the "research" folder in the Collections Records Object File. These require verification to determine if this portrait, or its earlier variant was included in the exhibitions.
George Bellows, Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919, oil on panel, 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.28 cm), Los Angeles County Musem of Art, Gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz (M.2007.84). http://collections.lacma.org/node/214920
(Image tiff and jpg available to download, I downloaded the jpeg size)
During revisions June 2016- I moved this asset to be a web resource because I did not have adequate time to add the image to Piction and catalog it appropriately.
Feb 2017- Piction cataloging-- adding this text as a note in the asset record-- This image was selected as a contextual image to use in the DMA online collection in 2015 but no workflow existed to properly vet the use of contextual image online. If not used online, the image can still remain in Piction for internal research purposes.
NOTE- I have added the LACMA portrait back to this object note as a UMO asset. It also appears as a web resource. This makes sense if we want to provide both a visual aid and a link to the additional information provided by another institution. It does not make sense if we only want to give people the option of following a link to an external website (whereas the image asset keeps the visitor in DMA.org.)
The following image had been suggested as an image asset but is being moved to the notes field during the June 2016 revision process because the publication copyright and Piction process will be too time consuming. Emma Bellows, photograph, n.d. Amherst College Library, George Bellows Papers (box 6, album 2, no. 58). Reproduced in American Impressionism and Realism (NGA, 1998), figure 5, page 41. ND210.5.14 A42 1998
Adding "draft" tag back to note, Dec 19, 2016, as part of the revised harvest/route procedure. This note will be pulled into GDrive and manually moved to Queta's folders for final review. Update- January 18, 2017- Adding #routed tag so that I can easily keep track of this note in Evernote to confirm that it is eventually pushed into GDrive. As of January 18, 2017 the content is in Brain but not in GDrive so I am unable to finish revisions and mark it complete in Evernote or move the GDoc to Queta's folder.
Confirmed note updated in GDrive. Tagged completed and moved GDoc to Queta folder. (1/24/2017)
added "earring" tag to test explore by query results, HAB, 10/9/2017
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Woodstock (New York)
Process/materials
oil paint
canvas
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
wives
purple
dress
sitting
woman
figure
blue
chair
hairstyle
pink
cloth
brush strokes
gaze
realism
portrait
RELATED OBJECTS
George Bellows, Emma in a Purple Dress, 1960.124
George Bellows, Emma in a Chair, 1960.125
PROVENANCE
Before d. 1925: George Bellows (1882-1925)
From 1925: his widow, Emma S. Bellows (1884-1959) [1]
Before 1956: H.V. Allison & Co., Inc., New York, NY [2]
From 1956: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, purchase from the above [3]
[1] The following comment about the early provenance for the painting comes from a letter from Franklin Riehlman of Allison Gallery (then working on a catalogue raisonné of George Bellows' paintings) to Eleanor Jones Harvey on 22 April 1992, "When the artist died in January 1925, he left no will. Therefore, under New York law at that time, his property came under the supervision of the New York State Public Administrator. Once the Administrator was satisfied that no claims on his property from persons outside Bellows' immediate family existed, ownership of the artist's paintings passed to his wife (this procedure took a little over a year)."
[2] This gallery acted as the representative for Mrs. Bellows but it is unclear when their business relationship began.
[3] The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.
AUDIO ASSETS
Gallery talk- American Portraiture- Martha MacLeod- 3/25/2015
Object number in Piction cataloging.
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
George Bellows, Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919, oil on panel, 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.28 cm), Los Angeles County Musem of Art, Gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz (M.2007.84).
248949250: UMO
WEB RESOURCES
- Framing George Bellows~Read Suzanne Smeaton's essay on The Frame Blog (ed. Lynn Roberts), June 15, 2013.
- Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919~See one of George Bellows' early efforts to capture his wife's likeness in this portrait that resembles but predates the work in the DMA collection.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
Exhibition ID #11271
Exhibition Title: Seventy-Five Years of Art in Dallas: The History of the Dallas Art Association and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
UMO: 12712585
Added object number to Piction; object linked to exhibition in TMS.
Exhibition ID #10936
Exhibition Title: Famous Painters and Famous Paintings
UMO: 12711825
Added object number to Piction; object linked to exhibition in TMS.
FUN FACTS
- Emma was thirty-nine and the mother of two girls when the portrait was completed. Bellows met Emma, who is reported to have been an attractive, spirited woman of strong character, in 1905, and they were married in 1910. The pair met while enrolled in a class taught by Robert Henri at the New York School of Art (formerly the Chase School of Art, named for its founder, William Merritt Chase).
- In a 1951 article on the recent exhibition of Bellows' work at H.V. Allison Gallery in New York, Time magazine focused on this portrait and Emma Bellows' successful management of her husband's estate after his death in 1925. Mrs. Bellows comments on the title Emma in a Purple Dress as having always puzzled her because, "I know that dress by heart. I made the jacket myself. The skirt was rose-colored, the jacket blue." ("Painter & Wife," Time 58:26 (December 24, 1951), 34.)
TEACHING IDEAS
RULES
Apply to objects where number equals 1956.58
Category
rules_operator
AND
General Description
A member of the Eight, or Ashcan school, and best known for his boxing scenes, George Bellows also produced moving portraits, as seen here. During the early 1920s, Bellows was preoccupied with the depiction of his wife. Towards the end of his life, Bellows treated his every day subjects in a simple, large, and monumental way. This portrait of George Bellows' wife, Emma Story, took over three years to produce and involved just as much dramatic struggle as the artist's well-known fight scenes. Emma in a Purple Dress is characteristic of Bellows's family portraits, in which the obvious affection he holds for his wife and children is balanced by an ambiguous sense of reserve.
Emma Bellows recalled her husband's terrific struggle to paint her face, as he scraped out each successive effort to capture her character as well as her likeness. He did not flatter Emma, or her elaborate dress, which Bellows liked for its textures. In the finished painting, Emma's eyes are cast to one side, her gaze distant. The light falling on Emma's face softens the resolute frontality of the composition, while in her averted gaze may be read the tedium of innumerable sittings.
A drawing in the museum's collection (1960.124) indicates the relative ease with which the artist handled the dress, but the paper ends at Emma's neck. Starting in 1921 and continuing for the three years he labored on the large portrait, Bellows executed lithographs which depict his wife in the same setting and attire, but experiment with different compositions. (1960.125)
Adapted from
- William Keyse Rudolph, DMA Label copy (1956.58), August 2005.
- P.F.R, DMA research document (1956.58), n.d. Collection Records Object File.
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, DMA Label copy (1956.58), August 1993.
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, "George Bellows, 'Emma in a Purple Dress'" in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Charles Venable (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1997), 249.
Fun Facts
- Emma was thirty-nine and the mother of two girls when the portrait was completed. Bellows met Emma, who is reported to have been an attractive, spirited woman of strong character, in 1905, and they were married in 1910. The pair met while enrolled in a class taught by Robert Henri at the New York School of Art (formerly the Chase School of Art, named for its founder, William Merritt Chase).
- In a 1951 article on the recent exhibition of Bellows' work at H.V. Allison Gallery in New York, Time magazine focused on this portrait and Emma Bellows' successful management of her husband's estate after his death in 1925. Mrs. Bellows comments on the title Emma in a Purple Dress as having always puzzled her because, "I know that dress by heart. I made the jacket myself. The skirt was rose-colored, the jacket blue." ("Painter & Wife," Time 58:26 (December 24, 1951), 34.)
Archival Resources
Exhibition ID #11271
Exhibition Title: Seventy-Five Years of Art in Dallas: The History of the Dallas Art Association and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
UMO: 12712585
Added object number to Piction; object linked to exhibition in TMS.
Exhibition ID #10936
Exhibition Title: Famous Painters and Famous Paintings
UMO: 12711825
Added object number to Piction; object linked to exhibition in TMS.
Web Resources
- Framing George Bellows~Read Suzanne Smeaton's essay on The Frame Blog (ed. Lynn Roberts), June 15, 2013.
- Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919~See one of George Bellows' early efforts to capture his wife's likeness in this portrait that resembles but predates the work in the DMA collection.
Notes
Removed TMS object tag because rule exists.
Changed artist name in TMS in accordance with preferred name in Getty ULAN- George Wesley Bellows. Completed biographical geographic locations in TMS and added Woodstock as a "work location."
Completed citations for current text entries from 1997 Guide and 1983 selected works. Added text entries for the 2012 guide text and all texts found in education files.
Added published references.
Moved two passages from Curatorial Remarks and entered them as separate text entries. [Sue asked if I removed her curatorial remark regarding the frame. After reviewing the audit trail, it became clear that Brian had moved the framing remark to the media record for a photograph of the frame, and I had moved two interpretive texts into text entries. Sue replaced her frame comment with a new curatorial remark. 3/28/2016)
Add object number to Piction assets-- and eventually to the exhibitions listed below.
Exhibition history--
I made several additions (listed below as part of this Notes field). If my additions to the exhibition history text entry field do not make sense--There are three memorial exhibitions of the work of GB listed in the exhibitions module for this object, but they have minimal identifying data and I can't distinguish which of these exhibitions may already be in TMS. I entered the most detailed information on the early exhibitions that I could assemble from auction records and other museum's online collections.
I removed the following exhibition from exhibition history because the evidence suggests that it was not the same object. I added an equivalent note to the bibliographic entry for this catalogue. 1921: "Second Annual Exhibition of American and European Art," Dallas Art Association, Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, TX, April 7 to April 21, 1921 This catalogue lists "Emma in Purple" as no. 7. This is most likely not the same painting as "Emma in a Purple Dress" because it was incomplete until 1923. The 1921 exhibition may have included the alternate version of this portrait, now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1925: Chicago, IL [1]
1925: Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, NY [2]
1925: "Memorial Exhibition of the Work of George Bellows," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, October 12- November 22, 1925, pp. 30, 91, no. 53, illus. on p. 91
1925: "Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows," The Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, December 1925, n.p., no. 19 [3]
1925-1926: "Memorial Exhibition of the Work of George Bellows," Worcester, MA [4]
1926: "Memorial Exhibition of the Works of George Bellows," The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, January 10- February 10, 1926, p. 11, no. 21
1958: "Famous Paintings and Famous Painters, " Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, October 4- November 2, 1958, no. 10.
[1] This exhibition is listed in the artist's record book without an exhibition title or dates. This line may refer to, "Special Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, Leon Kroll, Eugene F. Savage, Walter Ufer, Paul Bartlett, Edgar S. Cameron, H. Amiard Oberteuffer and George Obertwuffer," Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, December 23, 1924-January 25, 1925. These dates correspond to the abbreviated exhibition history provided on the object page in H.V. Allison & Co. catagloue raisonné online (http://hvallison.com/WorkDetail.aspx?w=136&b=http%3A//hvallison.com/collection.aspx%3Fc%3D63%26si%3D0). Additional documentation is needed.
[2] Unknown exhibition listed in artist's record book. Additional documentation is needed.
[3] According to the exhibition history listed on the National Gallery of Art's online collection for Bellows' "New York" (1911), this exhibition traveled to six venues, including Denver, and probably Buffalo, NY.
[4] A Christie's auction record (December 5, 2002) for Bellows' "Gramercy Park," includes the following information, "Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows," Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, February 22- March 8, 1925.
Emma S. Bellows added as the depicted individual in TMS.
TMS additions or revisions that could be made in the future--
Six additional bibliographic entries are listed on an undated research document by P.F.R and could be entered into TMS for this object and the two related works on paper.
An additional seven exhibitions are listed on the online catalogue raisonné entry for this work. I marked these exhibitions on a hard copy of the catalogue entry that is in the "research" folder in the Collections Records Object File. These require verification to determine if this portrait, or its earlier variant was included in the exhibitions.
George Bellows, Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919, oil on panel, 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.28 cm), Los Angeles County Musem of Art, Gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz (M.2007.84). http://collections.lacma.org/node/214920
(Image tiff and jpg available to download, I downloaded the jpeg size)
During revisions June 2016- I moved this asset to be a web resource because I did not have adequate time to add the image to Piction and catalog it appropriately.
Feb 2017- Piction cataloging-- adding this text as a note in the asset record-- This image was selected as a contextual image to use in the DMA online collection in 2015 but no workflow existed to properly vet the use of contextual image online. If not used online, the image can still remain in Piction for internal research purposes.
NOTE- I have added the LACMA portrait back to this object note as a UMO asset. It also appears as a web resource. This makes sense if we want to provide both a visual aid and a link to the additional information provided by another institution. It does not make sense if we only want to give people the option of following a link to an external website (whereas the image asset keeps the visitor in DMA.org.)
The following image had been suggested as an image asset but is being moved to the notes field during the June 2016 revision process because the publication copyright and Piction process will be too time consuming. Emma Bellows, photograph, n.d. Amherst College Library, George Bellows Papers (box 6, album 2, no. 58). Reproduced in American Impressionism and Realism (NGA, 1998), figure 5, page 41. ND210.5.14 A42 1998
Adding "draft" tag back to note, Dec 19, 2016, as part of the revised harvest/route procedure. This note will be pulled into GDrive and manually moved to Queta's folders for final review. Update- January 18, 2017- Adding #routed tag so that I can easily keep track of this note in Evernote to confirm that it is eventually pushed into GDrive. As of January 18, 2017 the content is in Brain but not in GDrive so I am unable to finish revisions and mark it complete in Evernote or move the GDoc to Queta's folder.
Confirmed note updated in GDrive. Tagged completed and moved GDoc to Queta folder. (1/24/2017)
added "earring" tag to test explore by query results, HAB, 10/9/2017
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Woodstock (New York)
Process/materials
oil paint
canvas
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
wives
purple
dress
sitting
woman
figure
blue
chair
hairstyle
pink
cloth
brush strokes
gaze
realism
portrait
RELATED OBJECTS
George Bellows, Emma in a Purple Dress, 1960.124
George Bellows, Emma in a Chair, 1960.125
PROVENANCE
Before d. 1925: George Bellows (1882-1925)
From 1925: his widow, Emma S. Bellows (1884-1959) [1]
Before 1956: H.V. Allison & Co., Inc., New York, NY [2]
From 1956: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, purchase from the above [3]
[1] The following comment about the early provenance for the painting comes from a letter from Franklin Riehlman of Allison Gallery (then working on a catalogue raisonné of George Bellows' paintings) to Eleanor Jones Harvey on 22 April 1992, "When the artist died in January 1925, he left no will. Therefore, under New York law at that time, his property came under the supervision of the New York State Public Administrator. Once the Administrator was satisfied that no claims on his property from persons outside Bellows' immediate family existed, ownership of the artist's paintings passed to his wife (this procedure took a little over a year)."
[2] This gallery acted as the representative for Mrs. Bellows but it is unclear when their business relationship began.
[3] The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.
AUDIO ASSETS
Gallery talk- American Portraiture- Martha MacLeod- 3/25/2015
Object number in Piction cataloging.
VIDEO ASSETS
rules
Apply To
Objects
number
Equals
1956.58
source file
object_notes_1_a-0409.xml.nores