The Lone Tenement

1909

George Bellows

Painter, American, 1882 - 1925

A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”

Media Options

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Like many American artists of his generation, George Bellows was interested in the various urban construction projects that transformed New York City into an ultramodern metropolis. By the time he commenced work on The Lone Tenement in December 1909, he had completed four paintings devoted to the excavation site of the new Pennsylvania Station, culminating in the Gallery’s Blue Morning (painted in March 1909). The Lone Tenement represents the nearly complete Blackwell’s Island Bridge (now known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge or 59th Street Bridge), which passes over Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), linking midtown Manhattan with the borough of Queens. Although the bridge was an impressive engineering feat and a symbol of progress, Bellows chose to focus instead on an abandoned, old tenement building and a group of desultory figures warming themselves by a fire. Such tenement buildings were associated with a host of social ills because of their impoverished and often immigrant residents. Bellows has imbued the composition with a sense of eerie wistfulness, recording the precarious positions of those who were being displaced to make way for the future.

The impact of the painting is strengthened by the artist’s technical mastery. Paint is applied in variety of ways, from passages of thick impasto just to the left of the tenement building to a series of quick calligraphic marks used to describe a group of figures milling outside the building to the right. Bellows’s bold, expressive palette of oranges, golds, and violets, especially evident in the upper left quadrant of the canvas, is also distinctive.

On View

East Building Ground Level, Gallery 106-C

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 91.8 x 122.3 cm (36 1/8 x 48 1/8 in.)
    framed: 123.2 x 153.4 x 12.7 cm (48 1/2 x 60 3/8 x 5 in.)

  • Accession

    1963.10.83

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: The Lone Tenement, 1909

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist [1882-1925]; by inheritance to his wife, Emma S. Bellows [1884-1959]; purchased 3 February 1945 through (H.V. Allison & Co., New York) by Chester Dale [1883-1962], New York; bequest 1963 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1911

  • Collection of Pictures and Sculpture in the Pavilion of the United States of America, Roman Art Exposition, Rome, 1911, no. 135.

  • [George Bellows Exhibition], Madison Gallery, New York, 1911.

1912

  • One Hundred and Seventh Annual Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1912, no. 57.

1914

  • The MacDowell Club, New York, 1914 [according to the artist's Record Book].

1915

  • Department of Fine Arts, Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 1915, no. 82.

1931

  • Important Paintings by George Wesley Bellows, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio, 1931, no. 268.

1944

  • Paintings by George Bellows, H.V. Allison & Co., New York, 1944, unnumbered checklist.

1946

  • George Bellows: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Art Institute of Chicago, 1946, no. 8, repro.

1957

  • George Bellows: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Art, January-February 1957, no. 15, repro.

  • Paintings by George Bellows, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio, March-April 1957, no. 12.

1965

  • The Chester Dale Bequest, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1965, unnumbered checklist.

2012

  • George Bellows, National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2012-2013, pl. 31 (shown only in Washington).

Bibliography

1929

  • Bellows, Emma Louise Story. The Paintings of George Bellows. New York, 1929: repro. 17.

1962

  • Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. Treasures from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1962: 174, color repro.

1965

  • Paintings other than French in the Chester Dale Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 49, repro.

  • Morgan, Charles H. George Bellows. Painter of America. New York, 1965: 102, repro. 318.

1969

  • Young, Mahonri Sharp. "George Bellows: Master of the Prize Fight." Apollo 89 (February 1969): 135, repro.

1970

  • American Paintings and Sculpture: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1970: 16, repro.

1971

  • Braider, Donald. George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting. New York, 1971: 54, 67.

  • Baigell, Matthew. A History of American Painting. New York, 1971: 184, repro.

1973

  • Young, Mahonri Sharp. The Eight. New York, 1973: 44, color pl. 12.

1980

  • Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980: 17, 146, repro.

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980: 27, repro.

1981

  • Williams, William James. A Heritage of American Paintings from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1981: repro. 201, 202, 205.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 572, no. 871, color repro.

1988

  • Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. Rev. ed. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988: 168, repro.

1990

  • Kelly, Frankin. "George Bellows' Shore House." Studies in the History of Art 37 (1990): 131, repro. no. 19.

1992

  • Timeline: A Publication of the Ohio Historical Society. October-December 1992:19, repro.

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 29, repro.

1995

  • Oates, Joyce Carol. George Bellows: American Artist. Hopewell, New Jersey, 1995: repro.

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 404, no. 332, color repro.

2007

  • Haverstock, Mary Sayre. George Bellows: An Artist in Action. Columbus, Ohio, 2007: 56, color repro.

2009

  • Peck, Glenn C. George Bellows' Catalogue Raisonné. H.V. Allison & Co., 2009. Online resource, URL: http://www.hvallison.com. Accessed 16 August 2016.

2012

  • Brock, Charles, et al. George Bellows. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2012-2013. Washington and New York, 2012: 9, 26, 94, 108, 109, 112, 299, pl. 31.

2013

  • Corbett, David Peters. The American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters, with Katherine Bourguignon and Christopher Riopelle. London, 2013: 28-31, 46, color fig. 12.

2015

  • Wolner, Edward W. "George Bellows, Georg Simmel, and Modernizing New York." American Art 29, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 119.

2016

  • National Gallery of Art. Highlights from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Washington, 2016: 274-275, repro.

Inscriptions

lower left: Geo Bellows

Wikidata ID

Q20191257

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