Emma in the Black Print

In the autumn of 1917 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held a memorial exhibition for Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia portraitist who had died the year before. It pushed George Bellows toward portraits of a new solemnity and weight. Two summers later, in Middletown, Rhode Island, he painted his wife Emma twice, and this is one of the two.

Eakins had liked to pose his sitters in old-fashioned clothes, and Bellows dressed Emma in a black print dress with a pinched waist, a pointed bodice and a full skirt, the fashion of the 1860s, half a century out of date by then. She sits against a dark background in a strong light from the left. Underneath runs a geometry taken from Jay Hambidge, a Canadian-born artist whose system of proportions, called dynamic symmetry, Bellows had adopted in 1917.

The other portrait from that summer, Emma in the Purple Dress, is now in Los Angeles. This one was bought in 1923 by the Boston collector John T. Spaulding for 3,000 dollars, and it came to the museum with his bequest in 1948.