Though George Bellows established his fame by capturing the almost entirely male world of New York’s boxing clubs, he spent the second half of his career surrounded by and frequently painting women. After his marriage to Emma Story in 1910 and the births of their two daughters, Anne and Jean, he lived in an all-female household that often included his Aunt Elinor and his mother, Anna. Bellows’s depictions of women came to rival, in both their variety and ambition, his more famous boxing scenes.
Among the most successful of Bellows’s many portraits of his family are those of his eldest daughter, Anne, which he painted from her infancy until September 1923, a little over a year before his premature death in January 1925. Anne with a Japanese Parasol was completed in Camden, Maine, in September 1917, when Anne was six years old. The previous year Bellows had represented his daughter holding a plainer, more generic closed parasol in Anne with Her Parasol (1916, private collection). Open on the floor, the decorative, more sophisticated type featured in Anne with a Japanese Parasol was a popular fashion accessory among upper-class women during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It may have been meant to evoke Anne’s burgeoning imagination and self-awareness.
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