Club Night

George Bellows’s paintings devoted to boxing were among the most popular pictures he produced during his lifetime and remain so today. Executed in August and September 1907, _Club Night_ is the first of three similar boxing subjects that Bellows painted early in his career, from 1907 to 1909. _Club Night_ represents a fight at an athletic club in New York City owned by Tom Sharkey, a former heavyweight champion. The enactment of the Lewis Law in 1900 prohibited boxing in New York State, but Sharkey and others circumvented the law by staging bouts in their private “clubs,” where attendees paid membership dues instead of admission fees to a particular fight, allowing them to legally gamble on matches. The public’s generally positive response to this controversial subject reflected an ambivalent attitude toward the sport. Some regarded boxing as a savage, brutal pastime, but many thought it a natural manifestation of masculinity. When criticized for not accurately representing certain technical aspects of the sport, Bellows responded, “I don’t know anything about boxing. I’m just painting two men trying to kill each other.”

In addition to precedents in the work of the American realist Thomas Eakins, Bellows’s boxing paintings paid homage to the European painters recommended to him by his teacher and mentor, Robert Henri (American, 1865 - 1929). Whereas Bellows later drew inspiration from the rich black tonalities and biting satire of the 17th-century Spanish masterFrancisco Goya (Spanish, 1746 - 1828) for _Both Members of This Club_, the smoky, atmospheric haze that envelops the scene in _Club Night_ and Bellows’s painterly technique and rendering of the crowd owes much to the great 19th-century French painter and caricaturist, Honoré Daumier (French, 1808 - 1879).