Study of Emma and the Children

In the summer of 1916 the Bellows family stayed in Camden, on the coast of Maine, and the painter Leon Kroll rented the house next door. Kroll had just begun absorbing the lessons of Cézanne, and he later recalled giving Bellows criticism every day. That summer Bellows set out to paint his wife and daughters out of doors, on a canvas about a metre and a half high. Emma reclines in a hammock with little Jean beside her, Anne, the elder girl, has her back to us and is about to climb in, and a striped awning runs across the top.

He painted the scene twice, and left both versions unfinished. The other, called My Family, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. This one is darker, and the colour is keyed differently. Where the Washington canvas is built on red and purple, this one is built on green and purple. A grid of lines runs across the surface, and the canvas was folded at top and bottom, as if Bellows was trying out a different size.

The museum dates it 1917. About 1922 Bellows gave it to the painter John Carroll in Woodstock, and Carroll's widow sold it to the museum in 1963.