Men of the Docks, 1912

As I was walking around the George Bellows exhibition at the Royal Academy yesterday, I kept hearing the soundtrack of Once Upon a Time in America playing through my mind, perhaps a decade or so out, but still capturing that raw energy of New York in the early years of the 20th century.
Bellows painted longshore men on the Brooklyn waterfront, waiting to unload a vast ocean liner with the skyscrapers of Manhattan in the background. He painted the street life of the Lower East Side, tin can fights between gangs, skinny boys bathing in the muddy East River,
and the vast excavation pit where workers toiled to build Penn Station. He painted the baying audience at seedy boxing clubs in the parts of the city where the tired, the poor and the huddled masses now swarmed. This is the underbelly of Edith Wharton's New York.

Stag at Sharkey's, 1909

North River, 1908

But Bellow also painted the powerful landscape that dwarfed the forces of industrialisation.And well-dressed middle-class families skating in Central Park on an icy-blue day, a painting that made me think of Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart and her hopes and disappointments in another city.

Love of Winter, 1914

Mr and Mrs Phillip Wase, 1924

Easter Snow, 1915

There was something very poignant about Bellows' portraits of his own family, his elderly aunt with her lined face and thinning old-lady's hair, and his neighbours Mr and Mrs Phillip Wase - she a cleaning woman, he a gardener - her hands gnarled, her wedding ring so tightly embedded in her finger that she couldn't take it off and with a studio photograph of herself as a lovely young woman on the wall behind her.

Finally, simply because it seems horribly appropriate, I couldn't resist this painting of ladies in their new spring outfits defying the snowy Easter weather of 1915.

Bellows is barely known in the UK, so I don't suppose this exhibition will be a crowd-puller but I think it's a knock-out.