DescriptionBellows first ventured to the island of Monhegan, Maine, in summer 1911 in the company of his teacher, Robert Henri, and fellow artist Randall Davey. Two years later his wife and two-year-old daughter accompanied him to the island, which was located a dozen miles off the mainland. The summer and early fall of 1913 on the island marked what was probably the most productive period of the artist's career: during a four-month stretch he completed more than one hundred oil paintings.
On his first trip to Monhegan, Bellows had worked primarily on small oils, mostly eleven by fifteen inches. Henri had advocated the use of smaller panels whose size facilitated completion in quick sittings. In 1913 Bellows returned to Monhegan with a stack of slightly larger panels on which he painted the cliffs and inlets of the island.
Bellows’ paintings from this visit retain the vigorous brushwork evident in his famous boxing paintings executed in 1907 and 1909. What is new in these paintings of the seacoast is the dramatic use of color. The work is no longer defined by limited palette but by the full array of chromatic colors. Evidently, Bellows had assimilated the bravura work of the Expressionist and Fauvist painters he met while attending the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York.
Since the beginning of the century, Monhegan had been an artists' retreat as well as a community of lobster fishermen. Bellows actively participated in village life and came to know every part of the rugged terrain, which measures only two and a half miles in length and less than a mile in width. One of the larger, more accomplished works he completed on Monhegan, "The Big Dory" portrays fishermen launching a boat into the inlet between Monhegan harbor and nearby Manana Island. In this and other similar views of lobstermen, particularly "Launching" (1913; Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Pa.), the artist focused on the energy of the men, contrasting the diagonal thrust of their bodies against the angled lines of the boat and the calm horizontals of the harbor. Much like his boxers, Bellows's fishermen are caught in suspended motion. Their struggle with the launch is but a prelude to the greater conflict they will encounter on the open sea.
Even before he left the island to return to New York that fall, Bellows began planning to exhibit his summer's work. In January 1914 he showed "The Big Dory" and twenty-six other pictures, mostly Monhegan scenes, at New York's Montross Gallery. Critics compared the work to the seascapes of Homer: "Following in Winslow Homer's footsteps, Bellows, like Rockwell Kent, has translated with crude color, oftentimes, but . . . with remarkable strength and sympathy, the scenery, the sea and the humans of the stern and rockbound Maine Coast. Such pictures as 'Launching the Dory' ["The Big Dory"] . . . certainly have truthfulness and unusual action. There is a gripping quality in these coast scenes and marines of Bellows' which holds those at least who know the locale."(1)
Another reviewer commented: "Mr. Bellows has been spending some time on the rocky Maine coast and no doubt the same things which operated on Winslow Homer's mind have operated on his. Two sketches of fishermen pushing a red-buttoned dory into rough waters are so strangely suggestive of Homer that they seem to be an experiment in doing a thing just as Homer would have done it."(2)
Even though Homer had completed many of his best-loved portrayals of the ocean some twenty years earlier, both he and Bellows, who was forty-six years his junior, submitted extraordinary works to the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of Design between 1907 and 1910. All three of Bellows's seminal boxing paintings appeared during these years.
While reviewers argued over brushwork and verisimilitude, they failed to note how Bellows altered the landscape to suit his specific needs. His first Monhegan works were topographically accurate. "The Harbor, Monhegan Coast, Maine" (1913; Minneapolis Institute of Arts) is a faithful interpretation of the natural harbor between Monhegan and Manana. In "The Big Dory", completed two months later, he removed a group of rocks in the middle distance and made the gentle rise of the island of Manana on the left into a scaled-down version of Blackhead, a cliff that towers 160 feet on the other side of the island. All of these changes were made for dramatic effect. It is in the skillful structuring of the scene that Bellows's marine paintings have a close affinity to Homer's work.

Bibliography:
Frank Crowninshield, Memorial Exhibition of the Work of George Bellows, exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1925); George Bellows: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, exhib. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1946); Henry McBride, George Bellows: A Retrospective Exhibition , exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1957); E. A. Carmean Jr., et al., Bellows: The Boxing Pictures, exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982); Michael Quick et al., The Paintings of George Bellows, exhib. cat. (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992).

Notes:
1 . "George Bellows at Montross's," American Art News 12 (January 24, 1914): 3.
2 . Unidentified clipping [January 1914], George Bellows Papers, box 4, folder 13, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Mass.

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