George Bellows (1882–1925), Sunset, Shady Valley

George Bellows (1882–1925)
Sunset, Shady Valley, 1922
Oil on wood panel, 16 3⁄8 x 24 inches
Gift of the Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom

Bellows is recognized as perhaps the most important American painter in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and his career is being celebrated in a current exhibition that, after appearing at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will soon open at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Though not one of the original members of The Eight, the group who broke away from the academic norms of American art in favor of an approach that embraced real life in all its grittiness, the younger Bellows has become identified particularly with the offshoot group known as The Ashcan School, which explored modern, often urban, life, in all its unsentimentalized particulars. This oil painting, recognized as the most important work in the collection of the Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom, was recently donated to the Museum as part of a group of works that included many of the most crucial pieces in the Hillstrom Collection. Bellows’ painting depicts the Catskills Mountains around his summer home in Woodstock, New York. As Hillstrom has noted, Bellows’ imagery is akin to the written description of the Catskills given by Washington Irving (1783–1859) in the opening of his Rip Van Winkle (1819), where he describes the mountains with “. . . a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.”

Text from the catalogue for the exhibition The Eight, The Ashcan School, and The American Scene in the Hillstrom Collection, presented in the Hillstrom Museum of Art February 25 through April 21, 2013.