Bellows' 1912 masterpiece will be bought using the money from a fund established by the late philanthropist John Paul Getty
Nearly 200 years after it was founded, the National Gallery is to acquire its first major American painting, using money from a fund established by the late billionaire philanthropist John Paul Getty.
The gallery said it was buying George Bellows' 1912 masterpiece Men of the Docks for $25.5m (£15.6m) from Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
It marks a new policy for the gallery which houses one of the finest collections of Western European paintings anywhere. Now it also wants to represent paintings in the Western European tradition.
"It is a very good new direction for us because many great pictures were painted in the European tradition outside Europe," said Nicholas Penny, the gallery's director.
Penny said the "fantastic" painting "will have a revolutionary effect on the collection and an electrifying effect on visitors."
Bellows is normally seen in the context of other American painters but in London it will hang alongside works by Manet and Monet. "It will be rather like seeing a Turner in the Louvre or a Wilkie in Munich," said Penny. The Men of the Docks is a very European painting in its technique and handling, so Penny says that visitors to the gallery would be able to see the debt he owed to Manet and also Goya and earlier Spanish art.
The gallery has 1 million American visitors a year. While it does have paintings by American-born European artists such as Copley and Whistler, the only truly American work it owns is a minor, rarely displayed work by George Inness called The Delaware Water Gap that was transferred to it from Tate in 1956.
Bellows is a superstar of American painting but less well known in Europe. He died in 1925 but it was only last year that a retrospective was finally staged in the UK at the Royal Academy. One reason his name did not endure as long as, for example, his contemporary Edward Hopper was his early death, aged 42, from appendicitis.
Bellows is known for his powerful paintings representing the hardship and desperation and grittiness of life in New York as it emerged in to the 20th century. In Men of the Docks he depicts overcoated men grimly searching for work on the freezing, Brooklyn waterfront with an ocean liner looming above them and the Manhattan skyline in the background.
Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800 paintings, said the "wilful awkwardness and brutality" of Bellows painting helped "evoke something of the raw and unbeautiful energy of the urban experience in what was at the time one of the world's fastest-growing cities."
All the money to buy the painting has been privately donated with most of it coming from the fund established by Getty before his death in 2003. The last major work to be bought using the fund's money was An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens by Adolph Menzel. It was bought for £3.2m in 2006. The acquisition forms part of a new transatlantic academic partnership between the National Gallery and Randolph College, the first of its kind.
It will go on public display in Room 43 from Friday, next to works by Monet and Pissarro.
It is the first publicly owned Bellows painting in the UK and only the second in Europe after Portrait of a Grandmother in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Reported by guardian.co.uk 22 hours ago.
Nearly 200 years after it was founded, the National Gallery is to acquire its first major American painting, using money from a fund established by the late billionaire philanthropist John Paul Getty.
The gallery said it was buying George Bellows' 1912 masterpiece Men of the Docks for $25.5m (£15.6m) from Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
It marks a new policy for the gallery which houses one of the finest collections of Western European paintings anywhere. Now it also wants to represent paintings in the Western European tradition.
"It is a very good new direction for us because many great pictures were painted in the European tradition outside Europe," said Nicholas Penny, the gallery's director.
Penny said the "fantastic" painting "will have a revolutionary effect on the collection and an electrifying effect on visitors."
Bellows is normally seen in the context of other American painters but in London it will hang alongside works by Manet and Monet. "It will be rather like seeing a Turner in the Louvre or a Wilkie in Munich," said Penny. The Men of the Docks is a very European painting in its technique and handling, so Penny says that visitors to the gallery would be able to see the debt he owed to Manet and also Goya and earlier Spanish art.
The gallery has 1 million American visitors a year. While it does have paintings by American-born European artists such as Copley and Whistler, the only truly American work it owns is a minor, rarely displayed work by George Inness called The Delaware Water Gap that was transferred to it from Tate in 1956.
Bellows is a superstar of American painting but less well known in Europe. He died in 1925 but it was only last year that a retrospective was finally staged in the UK at the Royal Academy. One reason his name did not endure as long as, for example, his contemporary Edward Hopper was his early death, aged 42, from appendicitis.
Bellows is known for his powerful paintings representing the hardship and desperation and grittiness of life in New York as it emerged in to the 20th century. In Men of the Docks he depicts overcoated men grimly searching for work on the freezing, Brooklyn waterfront with an ocean liner looming above them and the Manhattan skyline in the background.
Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800 paintings, said the "wilful awkwardness and brutality" of Bellows painting helped "evoke something of the raw and unbeautiful energy of the urban experience in what was at the time one of the world's fastest-growing cities."
All the money to buy the painting has been privately donated with most of it coming from the fund established by Getty before his death in 2003. The last major work to be bought using the fund's money was An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens by Adolph Menzel. It was bought for £3.2m in 2006. The acquisition forms part of a new transatlantic academic partnership between the National Gallery and Randolph College, the first of its kind.
It will go on public display in Room 43 from Friday, next to works by Monet and Pissarro.
It is the first publicly owned Bellows painting in the UK and only the second in Europe after Portrait of a Grandmother in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Reported by guardian.co.uk 22 hours ago.