Men of the Docks

In 1912 the New York waterfront hired its dock workers by the day, and men gathered at the piers hoping to be picked. Bellows shows a group of them on a freezing winter day on the Brooklyn side of the East River, standing about beside a pair of draught horses while the hull of an ocean liner rises over them like a wall. Across the half-frozen water the towers of Lower Manhattan stand in the haze, the business district set against the men whose labour kept it running. The picture's later life has its own story. In 1920 students and supporters of Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia raised 2,500 dollars to buy it. In 2014 the college, short of money and after years of protest and court challenges, sold it to the National Gallery for 25.5 million dollars, and it became the first major American painting in the collection.