Virginia M. Mecklenburg Blues and greens are touched lightly with strokes of tangerine; white spume bathes mosscovered rocks; sunlight drenches grass and bakes boulders while a scraggly pine stands watch. Beyond is the cool, empty ocean. George Bellows (1882-1925) painted Vine-Clad Shore-Monhegan Island in late summer, 1913. With its focus on rocks, grass, and water, this simple, brushy painting distills nature down to its essential elements. Balancing the informality of a plein air sketch and the more rigorous demands of academic composition, here Bellows negotiated a middle ground between the constructed and the observed. Instead of a panoramic vista, he adopted a lower sight line that emphasized the boundary between the earth and sea and established, through the use of the shadow in the foreground, an intimate connection between painter and place. The water always fascinated Bellows. Earlier canvases-whether of ragamuffins swimming in the East River, dray horses and stevedores poised beside a docked freighter, or elegantly dressed New Yorkers strolling along the banks of the Hudson-diminished the distinction between civilization and nature. The people and the waterways were linked together by the life and commerce of the city. From the time Bellows first turned to the sea he made a different kind of image. In sophisticated and complex compositions, he probed the varied and subtle relationships of man, the land, and the ocean. The first ocean pictures were done in the winter of 1910-11 from sketches made during his honeymoon on Long Island in September. The following summer, at the invitation of his friend and former teacher Robert Henri, Bellows traveled to tiny Monhegan Island, halfway up the Maine coast. That initial trip lasted just a month. Emma, Bellows's wife of less than a year, was in the final weeks of her first pregnancy, and he didn't want to be away from her. The couple had spent the first part of the summer with Emma's parents in New Jersey, but the visit had stymied Bellows's creativity and left him unable to paint. When Henri suggested the trip to Monhegan, Emma urged Bellows to go. During the month he was away, he wrote to her almost daily about his concern for her health and comfort, his loneliness at their separation, and his excitement about painting. By the time he returned to Upper Montclair (just one week before their daughter, Anne, was born), he had finished thirty small panels and twelve large ones-all scenes of Monhegan and the sea. In these paintings, Bellows seems pensive, awed by the power of the ocean and chastened by humanity's comparative insignificance. Whether emphasizing the dramatic