Provenance
Collection of the artist, New York; purchased 1909 by Robert C. Hall [1865-1914], Pittsburgh;[1] on consignment by 26 February 1923 with (Wunderly Brothers, Pittsburgh);[2] purchased by 12 October 1925 by Mr. [1889-1962] and Mrs. Peter Glick, Pittsburgh;[3] purchased November 1931 through (William Macbeth, Inc., New York) by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington;[4] acquired 2014 by National Gallery of Art.
[1] The painting was purchased from Bellows during the painting's showing at the Carnegie International exhibition in 1909; see the Corcoran Gallery of Art Accession Record Sheet in NGA curatorial files. Bellows sold the work to Hall for $300; Jane Myers, "'The Most Searching Place in the World': Bellows's Portraiture," in Michael Quick et al., _The Paintings of George Bellows_, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, 1992-1993; Fort Worth and Los Angeles, 1992: 232 n. 38.
[2] The painting was consigned to Wunderly Brothers at an unknown date after Hall died, and was "in and out of Carnegie Institute for a number of years;" Peyton Boswell, Jr., "Bellows' First Patron," _Art Digest_ 17, no. 8 (15 January 1943): 3. According to the Corcoran Gallery of Art Accession Record Sheet (in NGA curatorial files), the painting was found in storage at the Carnegie Institute and sent from there to Wunderly Brothers. The dealer lent the painting to the 1923 Bellows exhibition at the Carnegie Institute, which opened on February 26.
[3] The Glicks bought the painting from the Wunderly Brothers at an unknown date, but Mrs. Peter Glick is listed as lender of the painting to the 1925 Bellows memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which opened on October 12.
[4] Corcoran Gallery of Art Accession Card, in NGA curatorial files.
Accession Number
2014.79.2
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 106.7 × 153 cm (42 × 60 1/4 in.) | framed: 124.1 × 170 × 7.3 cm (48 7/8 × 66 15/16 × 2 7/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund)
Tags
Painting Early Modern (1901–1950) Oil Painting Canvas American
Background & Context
Background Story
Forty-two Kids (1907) depicts a group of boys—exactly forty-two, as the title insists—swimming and sunbathing at a New York City riverbank. This painting captures a vanishing aspect of urban working-class life: the river as communal recreation space where boys stripped down and jumped in, indifferent to water quality, safety concerns, or adult supervision. The number in the title suggests Bellows's insistence on documenting the specific, observed reality rather than an idealized composition—there really were forty-two kids that day, and he counted them. The painting's setting is likely the East River or Hudson River, where industrial pollution mixed with the swimming water—a reality Bellows acknowledges by rendering the water a murky, uninviting brown-green. Yet the boys' joy is undiminished: they dive, splash, and sprawl in the summer heat with the carefree energy of youth ignoring circumstances. The 1907 date places this among Bellows's earliest major works, painted when he was 25 and newly arrived in New York. The Ashcan School's democratic eye is fully apparent: these are not idealized children but recognizable urban kids—skinny, sunburned, and unselfconscious—rendered with affectionate but unsentimental attention.
Cultural Impact
Forty-two Kids influenced how American urban childhood was represented in art, establishing an image of working-class kid culture that influenced Social Realist painters, WPA muralists, and later photographers like Helen Levitt who documented children's street life. The painting also contributed to the cultural history of urban waterfront recreation, documenting a form of communal play that water pollution and waterfront development would largely eliminate by mid-century.
Why It Matters
This painting matters because it captures a specific form of working-class urban culture at the moment of its existence—before water quality regulations, liability concerns, and waterfront development ended the era of informal river swimming. For contemporary audiences, it documents a lost urban commons and a lost childhood freedom that resonates with ongoing debates about children's access to unstructured play and natural spaces in cities.
