North River

Bellows’s friend during his formative years as a painter in New York was Robert Henri, a former student at the Pennsylvania Academy, who shared his love of the painterly approach of old masters such as Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Goya. These were artists much admired by the French Impressionists as well. Bellows’s use of a heavily impastoed surface and a wide variety of noticeable brush marks in this work suggest a combination of older precedents in terms of technical virtuosity and newer Impressionist subjects the railroad and steamboat). Although Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro had introduced these themes into their Impressionist paintings as early as the 1860s, American Impressionists did not begin to incorporate them until the turn of the century. A scene along the Hudson River just above New York, "North River" was shown in the 1909 annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy and acquired for the permanent collection. In this work and the other winter landscapes he executed along the Hudson River in 1908, Bellows came closest to adopting an Impressionist approach. He maintained an interest in landscape throughout his career, although his later paintings tend to be smaller in scale, even sketch-like in execution, or vehicles for his experiments with color.