Painting and Sculpture

Cliff Dwellers (painting)

Cliff Dwellers (1913) is an oil-on-canvas painting by George Bellows that depicts a colorful crowd on New York City's Lower East Side, on what appears to be a hot summer day. Its dimensions are 40+1⁄4 by 42+1⁄8 inches (102 cm × 107 cm), and it is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1916. The painting is a representative example of the Ashcan School, a movement in early-20th-century American art that favored the realistic depiction of gritty urban subjects. In Cliff Dwellers, people spill out of tenement buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. Laundry flaps overhead and a street vendor hawks his goods from his pushcart in the midst of all the traffic. In the background, a trolley car heads toward Vesey Street.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Frederick William Elwell
• ▸1753
• ▸Hyacinthe Rigaud

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.