b Journal o f Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summ er 1995)

Artists and Athletes Carol Clark and Allen Guttmann Amherst College Images o f sports appear in Greek art, in profusion, and in the work of many of the major artists o f the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American and European museums have mounted exhibitions o f “Sports and Art” 1 and there is a lively, inconclusive debate among the philosophically inclined: Are sports themselves a form of art? Sports historians have often exploited the painter’s or the printmaker’s art to provide images of ludic activities. What reader o f sports history is not familiar with William Hogarth’s cockfights and cricket matches, with the racetrack scenes o f Edgar Degas, with the many boxers painted by Thomas Eakins and George Bellows, with the rugby play­ ers painted by Henri Rousseau and Max Beckmann? The problem with such illustrations is just that: they tend to remain at the level o f illustration. The im ages are instrum entalized, and C urrier and Ives seem m ore usefulbecause more m im etically realistic-than Ernst Ludwig K irchner’s hockey players or Edward Hopper’s cyclists. Without pretending to the expertise o f professionally trained art histori­ ans, sports historians can do more to ask about the artists’ interpretation o f sports. What does the picture or the statue reveal about the nature o f the activity? What does it imply about the place o f the activity in the culture? To provide at least a glimpse o f some terra relatively incognita, we-an art historian and a sports historian-have explored the w ork o f a num ber o f American artists. Our far-from-exhaustive-or-defmitive comments are meant as enticements to the sports historian to see art as interpretation rather than as illustration. The work of Benjamin West, the first American artist to achieve interna­ tional renow n, included at least one m em orable evocation o f colonial sports: The Cricketers (ca. 1763, oil on canvas, The Brook Club, New York). The five young sportsmen are the Virginian aristocrats James Allen, Andrew 1. Am ong the catalogues are Roberto Vighi, Sport ed A rte (Rome: Giochi della XVII Olimpiade, 1960); M artha B. Scott, The A rtist and the Sportsm an (New York: Renaissance Editions, 1968); Sport in der K unst (M unich: Bruckm ann Verlag, 1972); The Olympics in A rt (Utica. NY: M unson-W illiam s-Proctor Institute. 1980); A rt et Sport (Mons: M usee des Beaux-Arts, 1984); The A rtist at Ringside (Youngstow n, Ohio: The Butler Institute o f American Art, 1992). 2. The m any treatm ents o f this topic include Pierre Frayssinet, Le Sport parm i les beaux-arts (Paris: Dargaud, 1968): Benjamin Lowe, The Beauty o f Sport (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977); Hans Lenk, Die achte Kunst (Zurich: Interform, 1985). 3. O ther than for direct quotations, our references are to books and articles by art historians because sports historians do not need to he reminded o f their own work.

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A lvan Fisher (1792-1863), Eclipse with Race Track, probably 1822 or 1823 (oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.) (M unson-W illiam s-Proctor Institute, M useum o f Art, Utica, N ew York)

agriculturalist and breeder Charles Henry H all’s commission o f Alvan Fisher for such a group. The undated picture, Eclipse, with Race Track6, is probably one o f a group o f at least six portraits o f the renowned horse Fisher painted between 1822 and 1823 in hope o f selling them to Charles H all’s influential friends. It is possible that this picture is the one about which Fisher wrote to Hall, telling him that he had begun the portrait and planned to take it with him to the races at Union Course. By bringing the unfinished portrait with him. Fisher no doubt hoped to gam er new patrons, but also to advertise the authenticity o f his equine portraits, taken firsthand at significant moments in a horse’s racing life. Visiting Long Island’s Union Course was a good idea. There, on May 27, 1823, 60,000 o f antebellum America’s turf fans witnessed one o f the era’s celebrated intersectional races. Sir Henry, owned by William R. Johnson o f North Carolina, ran against Eclipse, owned by Cornelius Van Ranst o f New York. Sir Henry won the first o f the three four-mile heats and Eclipse won the second. As the horses galloped by in the third and decisive heat. John Randolph of Roanoke, one o f V irginia’s congressional representa­ tives and an ardent Southern nationalist, sought to influence the outcome by shouting at E clipse’s jockey, “You can’t do it, Mr. Purdy! You can’t do it, n Mr. Purdy!” But Mr. Purdy (and his mount) did it. Samuel Purdy appears in 6. See Fred B. A delson’s essay on this picture in Paul D. Schweizer, editor, M asterworks o f American Art from the Munson-W illiams-Proctor Institute (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), pp. 26-27. 7. John Dizikes, Sportsmen and Gamesmen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 34-35.

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Allen, and Ralph Wormley, and their equally aristocratic South Carolinian frien d s, R alp h Izard and A rth u r Middleton. Posing proudly with their cricket bats (and M iddleton’s dog), they silently proclaim their social and their ethnic status. (What pas­ time was more English than a game o f cricket?) Although Boston’s John Singleton Copley, W est’s pupil-bycorrespondence, did not pain t his cricket picture during his American years, one o f the most brilliant and romantic portraits o f his London ca­ reer (which began in 1774 and lasted until his death in 1815) presents a nine-year-old boy resting languidly on his cricket bat. This boy, Richard Singleton Copley (1737-1815), Richard tt u i a i j i - uHeber, 1782 (oil on canvas. 65% x 51 /,6 in.) Heber, left leg forward, leans to h,s ^ for Bri(ish ^ Pau| right, displacing some o f his weight Collection) to his cricket bat. His left hand holds the ball. Framed by a luxurious, pastoral landscape, he poses with his shirt slightly open, which seems appropriate for sport’s relative dishabille. Yet this clearly is a pose in aristocratic dress with sporting props, and not an evoca­ tion of the activity o f the game itself. In its brilliant color and evident brushwork, Richard Heber, painted in 1782, reveals the profound influence of C opley’s Italian and English experiences on his approach to art. But no aspect o f the portrait seems quite as British as the pose, with which Copley experimented in a chalk drawing (Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Mu­ seum, Winterthur, Delaware). Copley settled upon the left arm pulled up, showing the boy holding his coat in the crook o f his arm and emphasizing his prominent grip on the ball.4 Young master Heber knew exactly where he stood.5 Like their nineteenth-century British counterparts, wealthy Americans sought am usem ent (and status) at the racetrack. The American tradition o f p ainting portraits o f thoroughbreds began in 1822 w ith N ew Y ork 4

4. See Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley, vol. II: In England. 1774-1815 (Cam bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for the National Gallery o f Art, Washington, D.C., 1966), pp. 294-295, plate 424. Copley’s chalk drawing for the portrait is illustrated as plate 425. 5. Eighteenth-century sportsm en were not always painted at their ease. Although no A m erican painter em ulated the winterlandschappen o f H olland’s Hendrik A vercam p, G ilbert Stuart did m anage a 1782 portrait o f W illiam Grant gliding along London’s frozen Serpentine. Stuart’s elegant skater can be com pared to W inslow H om er’s coy glider in his wood engraving with the double-edged title, Cutting a Figure (Every Saturday, February 4, 1871), and each contrasted with A lex Colville’s Skater (1964). Seen from behind, face hidden, the twentieth-century athlete bends forward and hurtles through an abstract landscape o f gray, green, blue, and white. The paintmg, in the M useum o f M odem Art, is illustrated in Reilly Rhodes, ed., Sport in A rt from American Museums (New York: Universe, 1990), p. 109.

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F isher’s canvas, Eclipse, with Race Track, but the center o f attention is clearly the horse, held by its proud owner. The descending status o f horse and owner, linked by the tight rein, to jockey, placed slightly behind, to groom, seen kneeling to fold the horse’s blanket in the shadows at the lower right, is made abundantly clear in the composition. Contrary to the connotations o f his name, Eclipse stands in a circle o f light that falls upon him through a break in the clouded sky. The background shows a grandstand o f a course before the race, with gathering crowds and another horse led around the track by its groom, all set in idyllic rolling hills, punctuated with a white church spire. The central scene is framed by a ravaged tree in the right foreground, and a leafy one at left middleground that, together with the low horizon and wide expanse o f sky, suggests F isher’s com m itm ent to landscape painting, to which he turned increasingly after 1825. Eclipse, with Race Track records America’s adoption o f the English sport as well as American artists’ reliance on an English tradition o f equine portraits, especially those o f George Stubbs, whose work Fisher probably knew through engraved reproductions o f his paintings. But as English as it may seem, Eclipse also heralds a new American concern with landscape, which became the preeminent form o f American artistic expression in the middle decades o f the nineteenth century. Even as many American artists began to paint their landscape, some looked to the landscape’s first inhabitants as new subjects for their brushes. George Catlin set out in 1832 to see Indians in the western territories, rather than paint the few who came through eastern cities as delegates en route to the federal government. In Archery o f the Mandan, painted between 1835 and 1837, we see an aspect o f Indian life that Catlin wished to emphasize for his eastern viewers and readers: [T]he young men who are the most distinguished in this exercise, assemble on the prairie at a little distance from the village, and having paid, each one, his “entrance-fee”, such as a shield, a robe, a pipe, or other article, step forward in turn, shooting their arrows into the air, endeavouring to see who can get the greatest number flying in the air at one time, thrown from the same bow.8 This contest, like the horse race that Catlin witnessed on the same day, was part o f M andans’ celebration o f the safe return o f a war party against the Riccarees. What most immediately strikes the sports historian is the differ­ ence between this contest and those staged by Renaissance and early modem archers in the guilds o f Flanders, Picardy, and the Rhineland. Although the Mandans, like the Europeans, quantified the competition (“the greatest num­ ber” o f arrows), they shot rapidly, without taking careful aim at an abstractly configured geometrical target o f concentric rings. The most likely reason is that the Mandan hunter and the Mandan warrior released his arrows against a 8. George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the M anners, Customs, and Conditions o f the North Am erican Indians, 2 vols. (1844: rpt. New York: Dover, 1973), 1:141.

Artists and Athletes

George Catlin (1796-1872), Archery o f the Mandan, 1835-1837 (oil on canvas, 49.7 x 70.0 cm) (N ational M useum o f A m erican A rt, Sm ithsonian Institution, G ift o f M rs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.)

herd of buffalo or a hostile war party. He obviously prized the kind of quick­ ness depicted by Catlin. Images like Archery o f the Mandan appealed to eastern audiences on several levels. Simplified, even schematic, Catlin’s work is likened by an art historian to an anatomy demonstration in a classical frieze of figures striking distinctive poses.9 The artist stressed his firsthand observation which must have given his works a great sense of “authenticity” to his viewers. Another art historian suggests that easterners, who had their own competitive games, might have felt a bond with Indians depicted in works by Catlin. At the same time, however, any visual encounter would have been dominated by the overwhelming exoticism and racial difference that whites perceived.10 That prizes, in the form o f booty collected in the foreground of the picture, and the ritual display of male physical prowess were part of the Indian game could not have been missed by Catlin’s audience. Various kinds of hunting were favored subjects of George Catlin in the 1830s, and the following two decades marked the height of popularity for the theme, from subsistence hunters on western plains to society sportsmen in eastern marshes. William Ranney turned a year’s experience with the army in 9. W illiam H. Truettner, The N atural M an Observed: A Study o f C atlin's Indian Gallery (W ashington, D.C.: Sm ithsonian Institution Press in cooperation with the Am on Carter Museum, fort W orth and the National Collection o f Fine Arts, 1979), p. 267. 10. Ju lie S c h im m e l, “ In v e n tin g ‘th e I n d ia n ’” in W illia m H. T ru e ttn e r, ed ., The W est as America: Reinterpreting Images o f the Frontier, 1820-1920 (W ashington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum o f American Art, 1991), p. 158.

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William Tylee Ranney (1813-1857). D uck Shooting, 1850 (oil on canvas, 30 lA x 403/8 in.) (In the Collection o f the Corcoran Gallery o f Art, Gift o f W illiam W ilson Corcoran)

the American West into material that established his career as a painter of the white, western hunter. Ranney was one of the founding members of the New York Cricket Club, and although he is not known to have painted this sport, he turned his avid interest in bird hunting in the New Jersey marshes into a number of paintings. While one American myth celebrated the lone hunter, like James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, Ranney shows the familial aspects of the sport in his 1850 Duck Shooting11, where his brother kneels and stretches out his hand to receive the bird from the mouth of the obedi­ ently sitting, highly anthropomorphized dog. That the scene was “close to home” also may be evident in the landscape of the Hackensack Meadows, near the artist’s studio, in a tightly organized, triangular composition, Ranney links men, rifles, and dog as equally important in a successful hunt where male camaraderie in the outdoors is held up as an ideal. Men work together and with nature even when in a contest against nature. The autumnal darkness o f the background suggests that failure to cooperate might be dangerous. Sporting scenes were prom inent in A m erica’s new “national art” and w ere fostered by the A m erican A rt-U nion, an institutional patron whose directors annually exhibited works in New York and also distributed 11. Basic information on this picture m ay be found in Francis S. Grubar, William Ranney, Painter o f the Early West (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1962). For further on his western sporting scenes, see Linda Ayres, “William Ranney,” in American Frontier Life (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987).

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George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), Shooting fo r the Beef, 1850 (oil on canvas, 335/8 x 497 f in.) (The Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund)

engravings o f a chosen painting to a national membership. Ranney and George Caleb Bingham owed part of their success to the Art-Union. which purchased and exhibited Bingham’s Shooting fo r the B eef of 1850. In Bingham’s version o f rural sports, Ranney’s helpful dog has become a whole pack o f good-natured canine spectators to a genial test o f marksman­ ship. The prize animal, identified as a fat ox in the description in the ArtUnion Bulletin, to be butchered and portioned out to the winners, is the only participant to engage us with his less-than-happy stare, perhaps as way of commentary on the outcome of the proceedings. This western sport, well documented in literary reports about the West in the 1830s and 1840s, was a new subject for Bingham, who perhaps was inspired by the success of eastern sporting scenes, particularly of the turkey shoot. In Shooting fo r the B e e f Bingham stresses the role of sport in maintain­ ing community in new western towns, this one just a clearing in a bend in the road, marked by a simple building whose sign tells us it is both Post Office and Grocery and so serves essential roles of communication and sustenance. That this contest for the beef takes place quite literally in the shadow of such a building places the event in its proper context, as sport, as a supplement to needs already more or less fulfilled. The contestants smile as they wait their turn, and seem to take pleasure in each other’s company. Bingham presented his audiences in St. Louis and New York with a particular view of western life, that of a dozen polite men, neatly dressed in clothes o f bright, clear colors. They bask in a warm Missouri light which, along with the picture’s

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W inslow Homer (1836-1910), Croquet Scene, 1866 (oil on canvas, 157/8 x 2 6 ’/ I6 in.) (The Art Institute o f Chicago, Friends o f American Art Collection, 1942.35, photograph © 1994, The A rt Institute o f Chicago. All Rights Reserved)

triangular composition with one long, sloping side, signals order, harmony, and well-being. Here, Bingham’s evocation o f even the rawest American 12 settlement gave m en’s leisure and sport a central role. One of the few sports where women could compete as equals with men was croquet, introduced into America in the years just after the Civil War. In vogue for a brief time, the sport hardly liberated women to physical activity, as they remained restrained within huge skirts bound to tiny waists. Winslow Homer, perhaps attracted to the opportunity to paint fashionably dressed women out-of-doors, between 1865 and 1869 devoted five canvases to the game. Ambi­ guity marks his 1866 Croquet Scene in which three women, presented as fash­ ionable types, stand around a lone man who bends down to position a bail for one o f the women’s imminent croquet shot. Is his gesture merely polite, to accommodate the women for whom bending over in hooped shirts was nearly impossible? Why, as the central figure in the composition positioned between two women and touching the skirt of each, is his face hidden from us? That the game was a scene for social mixing, especially during the long intervals between any one participant’s active play, is clear. Young women valued the game for bringing them into contact with young men, whose ranks had been deci­ mated by the Civil War. Using mallets aggressively to send balls rolling through hoops may even have had sexual connotations. W hether or not H om er’s 12. See E. M aurice Bloch, The P aintings o f George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue R aisonne (Columbia: University o f M issouri Press, 1986), no. 224; and essays by Barbara Groseclose, Elizabeth Johns, and John W ilmerding in George Caleb Bingham (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with The Saint Louis Art M useum , 1990): N ancy Rash, in The P ainting and Politcs o f George Caleb Bingham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Elizabeth Johns, American Genre P ainting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

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W inslow Homer, The Bridle Path, The White Mountains, 1868 (oil on canvas, 2 4 '/8 x 38 in.) (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts)

contemporaries felt a sexual frisson on the field of play, his croquet pictures put women on display in the sunlight, where they strike athletic poses in brightly colored, highly fashionable clothes, and certainly dominate the few men who 13 dare to enter the artist’s field. Marriage, or its prospects, may also be a sub-current of Homer’s 1868 Thee Bridle Path, The White Mountains.14 It is not the aural double entendre of title alone that leads us to this speculation, but also Homer’s attention to the subject of women in post-Civil War America, coupled with our understand­ ing that many more of these women remained unmarried than would have before the war.15 Marriageable or not, Homer’s young rider is certainly one of the many post-war Americans who populated this summer resort area. Homer himself was a tourist there in the summers of 1868 and 1869, yet this painting does not correspond to any particular view on Mount W ashington’s Crawford Path.16 Homer rather draws our attention to riding as a leisure activity, one 13. See David Park Curry, W inslow Homer, The Croquet Game (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1984), and Allen Guttmann, wom en's Sports, a history (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 119-120. 14. We are grateful to Christopher Kent Wilson who suggested this in conversation some years ago. 15. There is the provocative possibility that H om er may have known W illiam Ranney's Virgina Wed­ ding (now at the Amon Carter Museum and possibly originally titled The Fowler's Return) painted in 1854 and exhibited soon thereafter. Ranney’s presentation of nine Joyful couples in eighteenth-century attire riding twoby-two on horseback suggests a focus on youthful m arriage that H om er’s painting, in its single figure with expressionless face, may counter. (We are grateful to Mark Thistlethwaite and to Sarah Cash for providing information on Virginia Wedding.) 16. See M argaret C. Conrads’s discussion o f this picture in her American Paintings and Sculpture at the Sterling and F rancine Clark A rt Institute (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990), pp. 63-67. For further on H om er in the W hite M ountains, see David Tatham, “W inslow H om er in the M ountains.” A ppalachia 36 (15 June 1966).

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increasingly popular with women in the 1860s as steamboats, trains, and horsedrawn omnibuses freed eastern women from horseback riding as a means of travel. In Homer’s scene, the young woman’s horse, seen in mid­ step, deftly negotiates a rocky terrain, but the rider herself stares down at the path before her, seemingly unaware of the scenery that we imagine to be a goal o f her ride. Her demeanor underscores the seriousness with which Americans of the leisure class sought mountain summits as antidotes to the lows of urban life. Thomas Eakins, Homer’s contemporary, and with him considered one of America’s great “realist” artists o f the late nineteenth century, also painted scenes of post-Civil War urban middle-class leisure pursuits. After four years of formal study in Paris, Eakins returned to Philadelphia, a city whose post-war technological changes had accelerated since the artist’s 1866 departure. The new technology had affected the sport o f sculling, in which Eakins participated, as new shells were constructed of several layers of varnished paper applied to a light wooden frame. The result was a craft that weighed one twentieth as much as the boats used in earlier races on American rivers. The invention of iron outriggers allowed the oarsman to row far more efficiently than had been pos­ sible before the movement of the pivot beyond the rim of the shell. The sliding seat was another innovation that facilitated the transfer of kinetic energy. In this technologically modem scull, so different from the unwieldy barges propelled by teams of watermen, sat a single athlete. One o f the most renowned of these oarsmen was a close friend of Eakins, who made him the subject of one of his finest paintings, The Champion Single Sculls, now called Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, of 1871. Unlike the first Currier and Ives print of the sport (1867), which de­ picted an awkwardly horizontal pair of professional rivals against an equally horizontal background cluttered by steamships and sailboats, Eakins’s tribute to the solitary amateur athlete placed Schmitt obliquely in what seemed an almost pastoral landscape of autumnal quietude. But it is a landscape embed­ ded within the city. Only after the eye has rested for a time on Schmitt does it travel downstream to another single scull, then to a small boat with two rowers and coxswain in distinctive Quaker dress, and to a steamboat set deeply in the illusionistic space of the Schuylkill River, beyond the trusses and arcaded piers of two bridges. A portrait of his city as much as it is of his friend, Eakins’s picture asks us to contemplate the athlete’s sacrifices. We know he is a champion, and yet, balding, squinting in the late afternoon sun as he turns to look over his right shoulder, and slumped in well-worn under­ shirt, he is an untraditional hero, one on whose face and body are written the strain of modem urban life. The outdoor setting and the evidence of athletic competition itself can be seen as compensation for what Eakins4s contempo­ raries referred to as the “nervousness” of American life.17 17. Elizabeth Johns, in the first complete study o f this painting, provocatively set the work as a portrait and within the context o f athletics as prescribed release from modern pressures. See Johns, Thomas Eakins, The Heroism o f Modem Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), chap. 2.

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Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), M ax Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871 (oil on canvas, 32% x 46/4 in.) (The M etropolitan Museum o f Art, Purchase, 1934, Alfred N. Punnett Fund and Gift o f George D. Pratt)

Max Schmitt was the first o f six oils and five watercolors Eakins made before 1874 when he abandoned the subject, but this is the only one in which the artist included him self in the composition, as the stocky man vigorously rowing away from us in the middleground. (Elizabeth Johns calls him meta­ phorically a “single sculler all his life.“) By doing this, and also by signing and dating the painting on the stemboard of that shell, Eakins further speci­ fied his scene, making him self witness to Schmitt’s win of 5 October 1870, and identifying him self as an active athlete in his beloved city.18 Eakins, who would paint scenes o f coaching, wrestling, and boxing as well, completed a series o f hunting pictures between 1873 and 1876. As Eakins’s own sculling informed his rowing pictures, so. too, did his personal hunting experiences affect these scenes. Begun in the fall o f 1873, his work was interrupted by severe debility from malaria caught while hunting and sketching in soggy marshes. He was forced to give up the sport, but pressed on with its imagery. Among the most poetic o f these works is the 1874 18. For further on Eakin's rowing pictures, in addition to Johns 1983, see Carol Troyen’s entry in A New W orld: M asterpieces o f A m erican Painting 1760-1910 (Boston, Mass.: M useum o f Fine Arts, 1983), Kathleen A. Foster's entries in John Wilmerding, ed., Thomas Eakins (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu­ tion Press, 1994), and W illiam I. Homer, Thomas Eakins, His Life and Work (New York: Abbeville, 1992). For an important study o f Eakin's landscapes in this and other pictures, see Kathleen A. Foster, “Realism or Impressionism: The Landscapes o f Thom as Eakins,” in Doreen Bolger and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., eds., Am erican A rt around 1900: Lectures in M em ory o f D aniel F raud (Studies in the History o f Art, 37) (W ashington, D.C.: National Gallery o f Art, 1990). All studies o f Eakins rely on the work o f the late Lloyd Goodrich, from his 1993 biography to the two volumes published by Harvard University Press in 1982, and his archive bequeathed to the Philadelphia Museum o f Art.

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Thomas Eakins, Whistling fo r Plover, 1874 (watercolor on paper, 11% x 16u / 16 in.) (The Brooklyn Museum. Museum Collection Fund)

watercolor Whistling fo r Plover. When black men appear in his other hunting pictures, Eakins shows them as hired guides or pushers, but in Whistling fo r Plover he isolates the African-American as his central subject, who we sus­ pect is bagging plover for him self and not for hire. Other hunters dot the landscape, their prostrate forms as inert as the felled birds surrounding the central w histler. Eakins identified this man as W illiam Robinson o f Backneck, sometimes called “The Neck,” a community of south Philadelphia in an area o f particularly fine hunting between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.19 Eakins later published two illustrations for an article on the area in which the author described marsh hunting: In summer no gunner haunts the Neck; in the spring and winter a few w ild fow l and snipe are som etim es bagged. B ut in the fall— on the firs t o f S ep tem b er— sp o rtsm e n , b o atm en , and “p u s h e rs ,” w ho propel the flat-bottom ed skiffs through the reeds, sw arm into the Neck. Anybody who can beg. borrow, or steal a fowling piece sa llie s fo rth , and m any are th e p ep p e rin g s o f sh o t th a t w o rth y c itiz en s rec eiv e from th e ir u n sk illfu l b reth ren in search o f the coveted reed-bird . . . T ow ard sunset the reed-birds congregate in

19. Brief studies o f Eakins’s hunting scenes include Carol Troyen’s entry on Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting fo r Rail in A New World (1983), Brian T. A llen’s entry on the same picture in Thomas Eakins (1994). Guy C. M cElroy addresses E akins’s depiction o f blacks in Facing History: The B lack Im age in Am erican A rt 1710-1940 (W ashington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery o f Art, 1990). For a general treatm ent o f E akins’s watercolors, see Donelson F. Hoopes, Eakins Watercolors (New York: W atson-Guptill, 1971); a more extensive study is Kathleen Adair Foster, “Makers o f the American Watercolor Movement: 1860-1890.” (Unpublished Ph.D, dissertation, Yale University, 1982), chapter 4.

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large flocks, and then the slaughter is great, and the noise is like that heard on any unusually jubilant Fourth o f July. Rail-birds are also objects o f p ursuit in the M a’sh; but rail-sh o o tin g can be enjoyed only at high tide as the boat m ust be pushed over the reeds.

20

In many ways Whistling fo r Plover is the antithesis o f Eakins’s other marsh-hunting pictures, whose dominantly horizontal compositions are punctu­ ated by the vertical poles of pushers. In Whistling fo r Plover nothing disturbs the design dominated by insistent flat marshlands. Eakins devoted two thirds o f his sheet to pale, cloud-filled sky, Only the crown o f Robinson’s straw hat and a few faint sails disturb the line separating the two bands o f his composition. High-keyed in its color and filled with light, the landscape competes with the carefully observed and precisely drawn portrait o f the hunter who makes ready to unbreech his shotgun and aim at birds attracted by his whistle. Robinson’s puckered lips make specific his ability to imitate nature’s sounds and so control his natural surroundings in ways he may not have been able to his social or economic life in a segregated Philadelphia community. An interesting footnote to Whistling fo r Plover is Eakins’s gift of it to S. Weir Mitchell, the Philadelphia physician and novelist who advocated the “rest cure,” or complete removal from everyday life, for women who suffered from nervous disorders which Mitchell, among others, believed were brought on by modem stresses. As men were advised (particularly by Horatio C. W ood, another Philadelphia physician-friend o f Eakins) to cure stress by participation in sport or, as Eakins did, by going west to sleep, eat. and revive out-of-doors, so women were confined to bed, force-fed, and subjected to electrical shock treatments, In 1875, the year before baseball’s N ational League was founded. 21 Eakins painted a watercolor devoted to the sport. In this work, Baseball Players Practicing, Eakins posed two players, one o f whom is positioned to bat. The artist rendered this scene with great precision, yet there remain certain problems in interpreting the players’ positions. Eakins may have been less familiar with this sport than he was with rowing or hunting, or he may have recorded one o f the earlier configurations o f the field.22 The figures, specific yet unidentified, were especially admired by Earl Shinn who, in a contemporary exhibition review, favorably compared them to an ancient ideal: The selection of the themes in itself shows artistic insight, for American sporting-life is the most Olympian, beautiful and genu­ ine side of its civilization from the plastic point of view. . . .The 20. M aurice F. Egan, “A Day in the M a‘sh,” Scribner's M onthly 22:3 (July 1881), with illustrations after Joseph Pennell, Thom as Eakins, and Harry R. Poore; quoted in Ellw ood C. Parry III and M aria Cham berlinHellman, “Thomas Eakins as an Illustrator, 1878-1881,” American Art Journal 5:1 (may 1873): 39. 21. K athleen Foster proposes that the work is from the spring or sum m er o f 1874 and that Eakins signed and dated it in January 1875 in time for the American W atercolor Society exhibition. See Foster 1982, p. 222, note 72. 22. See Foster 1982, p. 221, note 70.

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Thomas Eakins, Baseball Players Practicing, 1875 (watercolor on paper, 107/8 x 127/8 in.) (M useum o f Art, Rhode Island School o f Design, Jesse M etcalf and W alter H. Kimball Funds)

forms o f the youthful ball-players, indeed, exceed most Greek work we know o f in their particular aim o f expressing alert 23 strength in a moment of tension. In a letter to Shinn, Eakins had described the specific moment he de­ picted as “just after the batter has taken his bat, before the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. They are portraits o f Athletic boys, a Philadelphia club.”24 So Eakins made it clear that his subject was not just baseball, which was already acclaimed as America’s national sport, but Philadelphia baseball, and he sets his players against the bleachers o f a local stadium, peopled by just a few spectators." The most prominent spectator sits on the ground in front o f the stands, his figure a compact circle created by the comfortable position he

23. The N ation 20 (18 February 1875): 120, first quoted in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Am erican M aster D raw ings and Watercolors: A H istory o f Works on P aper fro m Colonial Times to the P resent (New York: H arper & Collins, 1976), p. 168; and m ore com pletely in Darrel Sewell, Thomas Eakins, A rtist o f Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum o f Art, 1982), p. 31. 24. Eakins to Shinn, 30 January [1875], Richard Tapper Cadbury Collection, Friends H istorical Library, Sw arthm ore College, Swarthm ore, Pa., quoted in m ost literature on this watercolor, but w ith full citation in Homer 1992, p. 69. 25. W illiam Innes H om er identifies the stadium as one at T w enty-fifth and Jefferson streets in w hich the Philadelphia Athletics, a semiprofessional team, played. See Homer 1992, p. 69, note 29.

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W illiam M orris H unt (1824-1879), The B all Players, 1877 (oil on canvas, 41 x 61 cm) (© The D etroit Institute o f Arts. Gift o f Mrs. John L. Gardner)

takes, hands clasped around his knees. With his signature26 positioned against the wall, in the same relationship to the batter as the spectator is to the second player, Eakins placed him self in the work, here symbolically watching even as he had painted him self observing Max Schmitt. It seems important that this is a practice session, for as he had with Max Schmitt, Eakins focuses our attention on the routine of practice rather than on the less frequent punctuation o f competition in an athlete’s life. The artist draws our attention to a particular moment in a proscribed sequence o f mo­ tions and. as Theodore Stebbins has written, “. . . the mood o f the watercolor is more one o f reverie than o f exaltation. . . . as the ball-players stand poised in late afternoon sunlight, the artist trying to make sense o f an increasingly 27 complex world through the ritual o f sport.” Baseball, invented by middle-class urbanites “more expert with the knife and fork at post-game banquets than with bat and ball on the diamond.”28 quickly acquired pastoral connotations that belied its origins. While Eakins set his 1875 baseball watercolor in a diamond backed by bleachers. William M orris Hunt chose a rural background for his The Ball Players. Painted toward the end o f H unt’s life, which was cut short by drowning in 1879, The Ball Players is one o f a number o f landscapes with figures that date from the productive summer and fall o f 1877 he spent on Cape Ann, at Magnolia, 26. The inset signature and the pencil m argins indicate that Eakins intended to crop the image. See Foster 1982, p. 222, note 72. 27. Stebbins 1976, p. 168. 28. Harold Seymour, Baseball, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960-1990), 1:18.

Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 1995)

W in s lo w H o m e r, S n a p th e W hip, 1872 (o il o n c a n v a s, 2 2 !4 x 3 6 /4 in .) (T h e B u tle r In s titu te o f A m e ric a n A rt. Y o u n g s to w n , O h io )

Massachusetts. Hunt had purchased and remodeled an old bam whose field served as the setting for The Ball Players. As part o f the preparation for this painting, he sketched the scene in charcoal (Baseball, 1877, Museum o f Fine Arts, Boston) and made several important adjustments between paper and canvas: he increased the size o f the field in proportion to the houses along a high horizon, he placed the pitcher further away from the two foreground fig­ ures, and he omitted two small outfield players. By doing this he isolated each player from the others and from the houses at the edge o f the field. The years just before Hunt’s summer at Magnolia were marked by a num­ ber of personal and professional crises. His lifetime’s work was destroyed in a 29 studio tire in 1872, and he separated from his wife and family in 1873. losses that might underlie the meaning o f The Ball Players, expressed in ghost-like figures Hunt sketchily drew and evanescently brushed onto his canvas. This particular game consists o f a trio o f players, or a pair of players observed by a third, whose feet are firmly planted on the ground and hands set upon his hips in concentration on the game that he, and we through him, watch. Far from the urban centers o f professional baseball, Hunt was surely not the only American to be attracted by a pick-up game o f summer baseball. A single generation after the gam e’s invention, it had already become a vehicle for lonely nostalgia. Winslow Homer may have experienced a similar mood when he contem­ plated the gradual disappearance of traditional children’s games as more and more boys and girls were drawn into the world o f adult-sponsored modem sports. “The country boy roams the. hills and has free access to ‘God’s first temples,” ’ commented F. D. Boynton in 1904 (quoting William Cullen Bryant). 29. For discussion o f H unt’s personal life and his position as an A m erican painter, see essays by M artha J. Hoppin and Henry Adams in William Morris Hunt: A Memorial Exhibition (Boston: Museum o f Fine Arts, 1979).

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Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924), The East River, 1901 (watercolor and pencil on paper, 13% x 19% in.) (The M useum o f M odem Art, New York. Gift o f A bby A ldrich Rockefeller. Photograph © 1994 The M useum o f M odem Art, N ew York)

“W hat,” he asked with a flourish o f rhetoric from John Milton, “can we offer to the city boy in exchange for paradise lost? His only road to paradise regained is 30 [through] the gymnasium, the athletic field, and the playground.” Painted a generation earlier, in 1872, Homer’s Snap the Whip, seems to be a rural vision 31 o f childhood interdependence learned through the joy of a game, but even here urban life intruded, in the form o f H om er’s models for the children. A visitor to Hom er’s New York City studio in the summer of 1872 reported in the New York Evening Telegram that the artist’s “models for the childish games he intends to 32 play in oil” were “the idle gamins o f the street.” Homer’s picture o f seemingly innocent childhood play set against the backdrop o f a rural one-room school house had political implications. If we believe the Evening Telegram ’s reporter. Homer quite literally turned “the idle gamins o f the street.” who probably were regarded as the children of immigrants and whose very presence in American cities was seen by some as a threat to national life, into perfectly behaved, barefoot (well, most o f them) boys, idealized in contemporary literature as well as in the tracts o f reformers. The debate about Americanizing immigrant children through education and organized play intensified by the turn o f the century, and it sets the backdrop for Maurice Prendergast’s 1901 watercolor, The East River. Might 30. B enjam in Rader, Am erican Sports (Englew ood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-H all, 1983), p. 149. 31. See Jules D. Prown, “W inslow H om er in His A rt,” Sm ithsonian Studies in Am erican Art 1:1 (Spring 1987): 34, and Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions (Philadelphia: Tem ple Univ. Press, 1989), Chap. 13. 32. Quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., W inslow Homer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 39.

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George Bellows (1882-1925), Forty-two Kids, 1907 (oil on canvas. 4 2 7 g x 60% in.) (In the Collection o f the Corcorun Gallery o f Art, M useum Purchase. W illiam A. Clark Fund)

not Prendergast’s playground represent Boynton’s paradise regained? It is clearly in the city, right along the banks o f an urban river, plied by sailing ships and tugs alike. A slice o f gray-green sky along the upper edge o f the paper is as filled with the smoke of ships’ stacks and the industry on the far shore o f an island as it is with clouds. The children are well dressed and appear to be exceedingly polite. Younger children hold the hands of older ones, they share in the sandbox. Although one girl stands on a swing, this hardly seems out-of-order in a scene peppered with adults who are gently, unobtrusively, in charge. A comer o f grass and a view o f the river give sem blance o f the country quite literally caught in P rendergast’s grid o f swings to provide children an oasis in the city. Prendergast’s image o f middle-class play contrasts sharply with scenes o f his fellow artists who banded together to exhibit as the “Eight” in 1908. George Luks painted street children dancing for their livelihood, and Robert Henri chose immigrant children off the street to use as models for his por­ traits. Their situation was clear in their faces, their dress and their demeanor, but none as clear, perhaps, as those painted by George Bellows, a slightly younger m em ber o f the group now som etim es called “ ash can ” artists. Bellows’s Kids (1906, oil on canvas, Collection o f Rita and Daniel Fraad) and his 1907 Forty-two Kids defy any reform er’s zeal. They lurk, they gamble, they smoke, they urinate in public, and they swim nude off a brokendown dock in a grimy urban river, far from the manicured, well-equipped

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George Bellows. Both M em bers o f this Club, 1909 (oil on canvas, 45% x 63 */8 in.) (Chester Dale Collection. © 1994 Board o f Trustees, National Gallery o f Art, W ashington)

playground o f Prendergast’s East R iv e rn These artists made the range of children’s play their subjects, and their images are embedded in the web of contemporary New Yorkers’ reactions, from a celebration o f childhood free­ dom to a desire to channel and control their play. Tum-of-the-century, middle-class reformers also concerned themselves with lower-class adults and their saloon-based recreations. Prize fights staged in back rooms both disturbed and attracted these reformers. The saloon was by no means the only venue. Boxing, often referred to as “sparring” in order to evade the laws that banned pugilism, was also a popular collegiate sport, especially with young men worried that an interest in books might cause them to seem “unmanly.” Theodore Roosevelt boxed and championed the sport, seen as middle-class, even gentlemanly in Thomas Eakins’s three latenineteenth-century boxing paintings o f the Philadelphia A rena.34 But the ambiance o f collegiate “sparring” was a world apart from the sheer brutality o f commercial prizefighting, And it was prizefighting, seen as part o f work­ ing-class life, that fascinated twentieth-century artists like George Bellows. As a young artist struggling for recognition, Bellows introduced him self to the N ew Y ork art w orld with a series o f brutal boxing pictures painted 33. For discussion o f im ages o f children and reform in tum -of-century New York, see M arianne D oezem a, George Bellow s and Urban A m erica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 3, and H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Paint­ ing o f Modern Life, 1885-1915 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum o f Art, 1994), p. 291 and following. 34. On Eakin's boxing pictures, see Carl S. Smith, “The Boxing Paintings o f Thom as Eakins,” Pros­ pects 4(1979): 403-419.

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between 1908 and 1910. The particular tension o f these pictures, included among them Both Members o f this Club o f 1909, defined the peculiar mix of prizefighting, masculinity, race, and culture in the first decade o f the twenti­ eth century.35 Bellows’s biography plays a role here. He committed him self early to an artistic career, and yet, possibly to counter a contemporary perception o f an artist as effete, he competed in team sports (baseball and basketball) at Ohio State University. He moved to New York City in 1904 to study art, and stayed for a time at the YMCA on 57th Street. A change o f lodgings may not seem so im portant for a young art student, but B ellow s h im se lf later remarked on it: “Before I married and became semi-respectable, I lived on Broadway opposite The Sharkey Athletic Club where it was possible under the law to becom e a ‘m em b er’ and see the fights for a p ric e .”36 The backrooms o f clubs such as Sharkey’s, inspiration for Bellows’s early boxing pictures, were then prime targets o f the Young M en’s Christian Association’s reformist zeal. If Bellows brought to Sharkey’s some o f this middle-class zeal, and a part of his proper midwestem upbringing, he was not alone, for men o f different classes mingled in the backroom crowds, attracted by the illicit aspects o f the fights, The ambivalence o f “respectable” Americans may help to explain why Bellows’s pictures were immediately accepted into prominent exhibitions and received generally favorable reviews. The way he presented the fights-as artis­ tic interpretations, inspired by eyewitness experience o f vicious encounters observed by blood-thirsty audiences-was also important. Bellows doesn’t out­ wardly condemn the fights, but neither does he unequivocally affirm them. If these pictures celebrate masculine power, they make equally clear the high price o f such display, As Marianne Doezema sums it up, Bellows presents a world in 37 which “. . . condemnation and adulation coexist.” Both Members o f this Club is the last in a series o f four works Bellows devoted to boxing between 1907 and 1909, and to it he added an issue, that of race, not present in the first three. He originally titled the painting A Nigger 38 and a White Man, thus foregrounding the racial aspects o f the encounter. Bellows began work on the picture in the autumn of 1909, a year after Jack Johnson wrested the heavyweight title from Tommy Bums. Against a social background o f heightened popular attention to a series o f “great white hopes,” the painted images become luridly significant. It isn’t known whether or not Bellows saw an interracial bout at Sharkey’s or another dub in the fall 35. Studies o f Bellow s’s boxing pictures include E. A. Carmean, Jr., John W ilmerding, Linda Ayres, and Deborah Chotner, Bellows, The B oxing Pictures (W ashington, D.C.: National Gallery o f Art, 1982), Robert Haywood, “George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkeuy’s: Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity,” Smithsonian Studies in American A rt 2:2 (Spring 1988): 3-15, and Doezema 1992, chap. 2. 36. Bellow s to W illiam M illiken, director o f The Cleveland M useum o f Art, 10 June 1922. A rchives o f The Cleveland Museum o f Art. Quoted in Haywood 1988, p. 3. 37. Doezema 1992, p. 88. 38. W e are especially grateful to M arianne Doezem a for her work on B ellow s’s sporting pictures and particularly for clarifying our discussion o f this painting.

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o f 1909, but his original title and the prominence, even dominance, of the black athlete (the white m an’s face is clearly bloodied and expresses pain), propel this painting beyond the specific reporting of an event. The artist’s technique, too, reinforces that his work is artistic response and not illustra­ tion. Although Bellows wrote that “Prize fighters and swimmers are the only 39 types whose muscular action can be painted in the nude legitimately.” the musculature of these fighters is defined not by carefully constructed illusion, as in Eakins’s portraits of boxers, but instead by long, sweeping strokes of color, whose evidence of energetic application echoes the physical exertion o f the athletes themselves. Compositionally, too, Bellows’s insistence on a defining triangular shape formed by the limbs o f the two pugilists, reinforces the self-conscious artistry of his presentation. Bellows gives us, his audience, a position above the crowd o f raucous participants. We look down on the tops of heads, some balding, some hatted, in the immediate foreground, and at an array o f faces, many of them splattered with the fighters’ blood, on the opposite side of the ring. Eerily illuminated by his studio light, meant to simulate the artificial light of a back room, and set off against a deep, black background, they leer and shout as they close in on the two fighters, perhaps in anticipation o f a bloody conclusion. Bellows includes no officials, no one who might be responsible for organizing or rationalizing this sport, or even for stopping it before one man is critically hurt. Within three months o f finishing it, Bellows retitled his picture Both Members o f this Club, changing the emphasis to include reference to saloon owners’ circumvention of the state law by admitting patrons and fighters as “members” to “private” fights protected from police raids. But his new title resonates in other ways, asking us to consider that black and white men were members of the same club, at least as fighters. Does this mean that, in this era marked by outward and brutal racial hostility, the possibility existed that membership in a more broadly constructed “human club” might be extended to all men? Or should we focus on the opposition of a white man. whose face we see expressing pain, and a black man who might have been seen as a faceless battering machine?40 The backroom of Tom Sharkey’s saloon is a world apart from the setting o f another of Bellows’s sporting scenes, the carefully tended lawns of The Casino at Newport. Bellows and his young family chose to spend the sum­ mers of 1918 and 1919 at Middletown, Rhode Island. But it was not only the sea, an essential inspiration to him in previous years, that attracted Bellows during those summers.41 Sailing and tennis dominated the sporting life of the 39. 1910 letter to Katherine Hiller, quoted in Doezema 1992, p. 215, note 84. 40. M any o f our ideas about B ellow s’s boxing pictures were stim ulated by Jerry Sm olin’s work on an American Studies honors thesis at Amherst College (1990), and we are grateful to him for the many conversa­ tions we have had over the years. In addition, we thank Jonathan W erner, class o f 1995, for his thoughtful observations about this part o f the article. 41. See Franklin Kelly. ‘“ So Clean and C old:’ Bellows and the Sea.” in M ichael Quick, Jane M yers, M arianne Doezemea, and Franklin Kelly. The Paintings o f George Bellows (New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1992).

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Journal of Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 1995)

George Bellows, Tennis Tournament, 1920 (oil on canvas, 59 x 66 in.) (Collection o f Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, © 1994 Board o f Trustees, National Gallery o f Art, Washington)

affluent resort community o f Newport, and Bellows made frequent visits to The Casino to watch the nationally ranked tennis players its tournaments attracted. Such polite surroundings must have presented a marked contrast to the subjects to which he devoted most o f the year 1918— the German atroci­ ties against the Belgians during World War I. Far from the horrors of that war, the graceful arcades o f McKim, Mead and W hite’s shingle-style Casino, site o f the First National Lawn Tennis Tournament in 1881, provide a back­ drop for Bellows’ game, played in the lengthening shadows o f a lushly ver­ dant summer afternoon. Tennis Tournament was painted in Woodstock, New York, and left unfinished in the summer o f 1920.42 In this painting, a small crowd has gathered around the court. Fashionably dressed, the women wear stylish hats and protect themselves from the sun with colorful parasols, while the men are in summer attire o f dark blazers and white flannel trousers. Our bird’s-eye (or umpire’s-eye) view takes in one side of the court as a singles player stretches up and back for an overhead smash, his energetic effort in marked contrast to the spectator on his right who lounges on the grass in a pose Bellows borrowed from Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur I ’herbe (a pose 42. The com position o f B ellow ’s unfinished canvas shows evidence o f his study o f the theories o f Dynamic Symmetry developed by Jay Hambridge. See Michael Quick, “Technique and Theory: The Evolution o f George Bellow’s Painting Style,” in Quick et al., 1992.

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Childe Hassam (1859-1935), The Dune Hazard, No. 2, 1922 (oil on canvas, 24 x 44 in.) (Courtesy o f the American Academy and Institute o f Arts and Letters. N ew York City. The Childe Hassam Fund Bequest)

which itself had a long artistic legacy). No greater contrast from Bellows’s all-male backroom crowds at Sharkey’s could be found than these Newport summer residents, on the grounds of another kind o f private club. Another sport then redolent with upper-class associations was golf. The game, imbued with the aura o f its Scottish origins, was still dominated by white men o f British ancestry, but by the 1920s, when Childe Hassam painted The Dune Hazard, No. 2, golf was played on public links as well as in country clubs and on private estates.4j A sportsman himself, Hassam played golf in East Hampton. Long Island, his summer home, at the Maidstone Club, which he is said to have described as a country club discovered by artists. The site of this painting may indeed be the Maidstone Club, its dune hazard seeming to be more naturally formed by the ocean than constructed by a golfcourse designer. Hassam’s particular choice o f this sport, which relies less than others on the power and speed o f youth, may be owing to his own advancing age. The golfer who stands in the foreground o f this picture is not identified, but it is harmless sentimentality to imagine Bobby Jones there against the background of grass, sand, and pale blue sky. As the United States rushed and roared into the “Jazz Age,” Hassam’s quietly secluded vision of one side of American life must have seemed to many almost as anachronistic as his impressionist style. In the 1930s, golf was satirized as the suburban pastime o f bloated philistines in Paul Cadmus’s Aspects o f Suburban Life: G olf (1936, oil on canvas, National Museum o f American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Wash­ ington, D.C. Transfer from the U.S. Department o f State). Boxers rather than 43. For a brief, interesting study o f the images o f sport in Am erican art betw een 1865 and 1914, see Ronald g. Pisano, Idle hours: Am ericans at Leisure, 1865-1914 (Boston: Little, Brown and Com pany, 1988), pp. 105-121.

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Journal o f Sport History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Sum m er 1995)

Robert Riggs (1896-1970), The Brown Bomber, ca. 1939 (oil on board, 30 x 40 in.) (Courtesy o f Capricorn Galleries, Bethesda, Maryland)

golfers seemed to embody the spirit of the age. none o f them more fully than Joe Louis. For white Americans, acceptance o f a black heavyweight cham­ pion came when Louis entered the ring in 1938 for a rematch against Max Schmeling, the only fighter who had ever knocked him out. Although the German boxer was perceived as Adolph Hitler’s standard bearer, he was not a Nazi. His American m anager was a Jew and Anny Ondra, with whom Schmeling was then in love, ran a German film company dissolved by the Nazis because two-thirds of the stockholders were Jews. In the minds of most Americans, however, Schm eling’s personal allegiances were irrelevant. Hitler was for Schmeling, was he not? Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for Louis, was he not? What else did one need to know? On 22 June 1938, seventy thousand fight fans paid $1,015,012 to sit in Yankee Stadium and watch a battle that lasted less than one round. On the streets of Harlem there was jubilation. New York Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine demonstrated goodwill (or simple prudence) by banning vehicular traffic on 7th Avenue from 125th Street to 145th Street. It may be an exaggeration to say. as one of the champion’s biographers did, that “even blatant racists had to accept Louis as America’s representative.”44 but every­ one who was not a blatant racist did. The second Schmeling fight, unlike Max Baer’s 1933 victory over the German champion, became a legendary event. 44. p. 157.

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Chris M ead, Champion: Joe Louis: Black Hero in W hite A m erica (New York: Scribner’s, 1985),

Artists and Athletes

Edward Hopper (1882-1967), French Six-Day Bicycle Rider, 1937 (oil on canvas, 17 x 19 in.) (Collection o f Mr. and Mrs. Albert Hackett)

Newspaper cartoonists who had tended to portray black fighters as “savage, ape-like creatures.”45 seemed suddenly to realize that Louis was a handsome man. The most interesting visual interpretation o f the Louis-Schmeling fight is Robert Riggs’s oil o f about 1939, entitled The Brown Bomber. In this picture, a grim-vrisaged Louis, whose skin has been lightened by the artist to almost the same hue as the German’s, leans over Schmeling, who has fallen to hands and knees and seems to want nothing more than to crawl away to safety. Since the referee also hovers over the beaten fighter, he and Louis form a kind o f arch under which Schmeling sprawls in utter humiliation. The ringside fight fans bend forward too, which gives the entire scene an air of dynamic instability. The towel thrown into the ring by Schmeling’s second flutters toward Lewis like a banderole around a deity or hero in an early Renaissance picture. In The Brown Bomber, all eyes are on the fallen fighter. In Edward Hopper’s French Six-Day Bicycle Rider, painted in 1937, no none looks at 45. W illiam H. W iggins, Jr., “ B oxing’s Sambo Twins: Racial Stereotypes in Jack Johnson and Joe Louis Newspaper Cartoons, 1908 to 1938,” Journal o f Sport history 15:3 (Winter 1988): 244.

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anyone else. For this picture, Hopper drew upon his own experience bicyclist and, more specifically, on his attendance at the International Day Bicycle Race, held at Madison Square Garden in November 1936. eral years later he wrote about a particular racer he had observed sketched:

as a SixSev­ and

I did not attem pt an accurate portrait, but it resem bles him in a general way. . . .

He is supposed to be resting during the sprints

w hile his team m ate is on the track or at the tim e w hen “The G arden” is full in the afternoon or evening, w hen both m em bers o f a team are on the alert to see that no laps are stolen from them. T his rider that suggested the one I painted, was young and dark and quite French in appearance.46

These apparently anomic figures are familiar actors from Hopper’s painted cast of contemporary Americans. They resemble the bosses and their secre­ taries, the gas station attendants, the overnight motel guests, the theater ushers. The sportsman, rare in Hopper’s work, is not immune to this perva­ sive loneliness and isolation. The cyclist’s outstretched legs make a bloodless contrast to his bright red jersey, the color of which resonates against its complementary green of the cabinet’s curtain. Like the cynical, dishonest cyclists who disturb the Spanish idyll in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hopper’s figure suggests that sports offer no privileged sanctu­ ary from the stresses, uncertainties, and dislocations of modernity. It is diffi­ cult to imagine that any twentieth-century artist, not even those addicted, like Andy Warhol, to popular culture, could fill a canvas with figures as confident and self-assured as W est’s and Copley’s cricketplayers.

45. Hopper to Lloyd Goodrich, unpublished letter 4 Septem ber 1944, quoted in Gail Levin, E dw ard Hopper: the A rt and the A rtist (New York: W. W. Norton & Com pany, 1980). p. 42. See Levin for further discussion o f this work.

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