George Bellows

George Bellows painted boxing matches in illegal clubs, tenement children swimming in the East River, and Manhattan construction sites, all before he turned thirty. He came out of Robert Henri’s circle, the group later labelled the Ashcan School, and shared their appetite for unglamorous city subjects.

The fight pictures are the ones that stuck. Bodies collide at the centre of a dark canvas while the crowd below dissolves into leering shapes. Both Members of This Club, painted in 1909, still looks violent.

He was a serious lithographer and produced a set of prints on German atrocities in Belgium during the First World War, which are harder to look at than anything in the boxing work. Later he moved toward portraits and Maine landscapes and became preoccupied with compositional theory. He died at forty two of a ruptured appendix.