Emma and Her Children

In a letter of 1943, Emma Bellows looked back on the sittings for this picture, painted 20 years earlier. Her own figure and that of her younger daughter Jean had gone well from the start, she wrote, while Anne, then 12, was harder to fit in.

That was the summer of 1923, a productive season for George Bellows in Woodstock, an artists' colony in the Hudson River valley. He arranged his wife and daughters in a composition that recalls Renoir's large portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had bought to acclaim in 1907. Emma's arm circles Jean, who sits with her legs askew among billowing petticoats, and Anne, on the edge of growing up, holds her hands nervously and keeps her ankles stiffly crossed. Bellows died suddenly in January 1925. Emma inherited the canvas, it passed to the Boston Art Club, and that March the club gave it to the museum, partly as a gift and partly by sale.