Painter & Wife

When he was not painting grim ringside views of prizefighters at work, Artist George Bellows liked nothing better than to paint pleasant pictures of his pretty wife Emma. Bellows painted six of them in 15 years, and all but two were sold. Last week Emma Bellows was offering her favorite for sale at a small Manhattan showing of her husband's works.

As one of Bellows' best, Emma in a Purple Dress ranks high among U.S. portraits. Scanning his wife's trim ankles, high-piled dark hair and tapering fingers with an appreciative, penetrating eye, Bellows managed to give her face and figure the elegance and spirit of a Goya duchess, her simple low-waisted silk dress an air of perennial chic. It was the last portrait he ever did of his wife. In 1925, two years after he completed it, he died at 42, at the peak of his talent.

Since then, Emma Bellows has lived on in the small Manhattan house where her husband had his studio. She has spent her time raising their two daughters, managing the fat parcel of canvases Painter Bellows left behind ("That's a full-time job, choosing varnishes, choosing frames"). By carefully supervised sales to important U.S. museums and collections, she has supported herself, helped establish her husband as one of America's favorite painters. "I won't let just anybody buy George's paintings," she says. "I want them placed where they can be seen."

Last week, a plump grandmother of 67, Emma Bellows was not upset at the thought of parting with her last important portrait, but she was still puzzling over one thing. "I know that dress by heart. I made the jacket myself. The skirt was rose-colored, the jacket blue. I don't know why he called it Emma in a Purple Dress."

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