Dempsey et Firpo

George Bellows was at ringside on the night of the 14th of September 1923, when the champion Jack Dempsey fought the Argentine challenger Luis Firpo at the Polo Grounds in New York. In the first round Firpo caught Dempsey with a right and knocked him clean out of the ring, down into the press seats. That is the instant Bellows painted: Dempsey tumbling backward through the ropes, a sportswriter's hands reaching to shove him back in. Dempsey climbed back onto the canvas and won in the second round, but the picture keeps him falling. Bellows had made his name a decade earlier with raw paintings of illegal club fights. This was his last great boxing scene. He died the next year, in 1925, of a burst appendix, at 42.