Love of Winter

George Wesley Bellows · 1914

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

81.6 × 101.6 cm (32 1/2 × 40 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Love of Winter captures the electric joy of a New York winter day with a vitality that feels almost physical — figures bundled against the cold, careening down snow-covered hills as bare trees frame a pewter sky. Bellows was one of the great American realists of the early twentieth century, closely aligned with the Ashcan School and its conviction that ordinary urban life was worthy subject matter for serious painting. His technique was loose and muscular, built on bold, loaded brushstrokes that give his canvases a sense of motion and spontaneity — qualities on full display here in the tumbling, laughing crowd. He had an unusual gift for rendering collective energy, the way a group of people in a shared moment becomes something larger than its parts. Bellows produced this work the same year he was elected to the National Academy of Design, at a point when his reputation was firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic. A hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas preserves everything that makes the original compelling: the loose confidence of the brushwork, the tonal range from bright snow to deep shadow, and the sense that someone genuinely felt the cold air while putting paint to canvas. It is a faithful rendering of one of American realism's most exuberant moments.