Cleveland Museum of Art

Introducing the Champion, No. 1, Large

George Bellows

Date

1916

Medium

lithograph

Culture

America

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Due to the popularity of his early boxing paintings such as Stag at Sharkey’s, Bellows was often commissioned by newspapers and magazines to depict sporting events, both actual and fictional. One of the artist’s first boxing prints, Introducing the Champion was inspired by a drawing he made three years earlier to illustrate a short story in American Magazine, which describes an imagined lightweight champion nicknamed Tornado Black. The cocky gloating of this character, who panders to the crowd, provides the impetus for Bellows’s rendering.

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