Nude with Red Hair

_Nude with Red Hair_ is one of two nude subjects that Bellows painted in his rural Woodstock, New York, studio in July 1920. The model has been identified as Agnes Tait, a young art student who was attending the Art Students League’s summer school in Woodstock. Both the figure’s pose, modestly covering her breasts with her raised left forearm and hand, and the use of light are strongly reminiscent of Titian’s famous _Venus with a Mirror_, which Bellows may have known through a reproduction or one of the numerous copies or variants after it.

Bellows’s awareness of the importance of life drawing and old master precedents can be traced to his education with Robert Henri and remained in evidence throughout his career. Art historians have generally neglected George Bellows’s nude compositions despite the fact that they represent a significant part of his oeuvre. As early as 1905 Bellows had received recognition for his skill in life drawing as a student at the New York School of Art, and by 1910 he was teaching life classes at the Art Students League. Among his final major paintings are _Nude with Hexagonal Quilt_ and _Two Women_ (1924, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas), which is based on another famous painting by Titian: _Sacred and Profane Love_ (c. 1515, Galleria Borghese, Rome). These last nudes depicting women shuttered away from the outside world in Bellows’s Woodstock studio stand in stark contrast to the public spectacles featured in his early, aggressively masculine boxing scenes.