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George Bellows was known for his painting of urban scenes, and he was often linked with the Ash Can School. His meteoric rise to success began when he moved to New York City from Columbus, Ohio, in 1904. In the next five years, he rose from beginning art student to critical and commercial success, culminating in his election as associate of the National Academy of Design in 1909. He was a college drop-out at 22, member of the National Academy at 27, the country’s most accomplished lithographer at 35, and dead of appendicitis at 43.During his brief lifetime, Bellows was given major one-artist exhibitions at museums in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Worcester, Cincinnati, Columbus and Rochester. Since his death in 1925, the country’s most significant collections of American painting have granted Bellows a place among their most important artists, and celebrated his accomplishments in at least 20 major exhibitions. Bellows created an enormous body of work in his 21 years – more than 700 hundred paintings, almost 200 editions of lithographs and an equivalent number of drawings. Best known for a relatively small number of controversial boxing images, he is equally notable for his contributions to American landscape painting, portraiture, and especially scenes of modern American life. Although his talent is most directly evident in his drawings, no one has yet paid them more than cursory attention. The Powerful Hand of George Bellows begins the long-overdue process of correcting this oversight. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition illustrates all 48 Wiggin drawings, and describes for the first time the ingenious combinations of graphic media Bellows used to create them. It also details the circumstances under which he made them, the specifics of his active career as a commercial artist and cartoonist underlying his more celebrated role as a painter. George Bellows was blessed with a quick wit and a quicker hand. Recorded in these drawings is a new understanding of the meteoric course along which his talents carried him.