Lady Jean, 1924
Oil on canvas, 72 x 36 in. (182.9 x 91.4 cm)
Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903
1961.18.7
Bellows's daughters, Anne and Jean, were his favorite models. Though nine-year-old Jean's tight-lipped expression in this portrait suggests otherwise, later in life she recalled that she enjoyed posing for it, because Bellows held her attention by playing Victrola records and reading Black Beauty: "Posing for 'Lady Jean' was quite easy—it took him only five days to complete. When I became weary of standing, he would let me sit, and he paid me regular model's wages for my time." While Bellows's art belongs firmly in the mainstream of the American realist tradition, his work of the 1920s reflects much of the era's sense of tonal and abstract values. Painted at the artist's summer retreat in Woodstock, New York, the portrait of Jean is full of old-fashioned detail—the bustled, adult dress of the 1880s, the hooked rug, the furniture—but the painting's non-atmospheric quality and brilliant colors, and complex system of interlocking angles and planes reflect the impact of modernist ideas.
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