The first official game of baseball on record in the United States was held in June of 1846 against the New York Knickerbockers. Uniforms were made of heavy wool and flannel and tobacco was frequently chewed as more fledgling teams formed; eventually, today's American and National Leagues came about and color barriers were crossed to allow for a long overdue racial integration.
Baseball is a sport that emerged with America’s burgeoning 19th and 20th century identity to become a major part of the national culture. From the game’s great stars to the excitement of the World Series to the actual ballpark experience, baseball has expanded and endured—and on various occasions has inspired artists to capture scenes of the action on the diamond or glimpses of fans in the stands.
Thomas Eakins’ Baseball Players Practicing
Artist and educator Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) studied in Europe for a period of time, yet he later returned to the United States to take what he had learned abroad and use it to develop a truly American style. Known for his distinct realism and scenes of his native Philadelphia, Eakins was also an artist who loved the form of the human body. He therefore often included American sporting life in his work, creating paintings of rowing on the Schuylkill River, boxing, and early moments in baseball.
In Eakins’ 1875 Baseball Players Practicing, the medium of watercolor is used to deftly hone in on two Philadelphia Athletics players while blurring the scant group of spectators and lone man sitting on the Jefferson Street Grounds sidelines. With expert strokes, Eakins clearly defines the ready stance and sinewy forearms of the player up at bat, while an unmasked and ungloved catcher waits tautly behind him.
George Luks’ Boy with Baseball
American Ashcan School painters furthered Eakins’ quest for realism by leaving cloistered studios and finding subject matter from out in the world, particularly the urban landscape. Ashcan artist George Wesley Bellows was so good at baseball at Ohio State that he could have played professionally, but he bypassed that opportunity to pursue a painting career. Like Eakins, Bellows painted scenes from boxing matches and also produced baseball-related work.
Another George in the Ashcan School group and member of the original Robert Henri-founded Eight was George Luks (1866-1933). Luks was a hard-drinking yet productive and perceptive artist whose 1925 Boy with Baseball presents a poignant picture. Luks had once drawn a regular comic strip of street urchin types for the New York World, and his Boy with Baseball has a bit of that adorable ruffian quality. The child’s expression and pose are so ambiguous, however, that they almost give the painting a melancholy detachment. We wonder whether the boy even likes the game or is he perhaps lonely with no one else to play with—or has he just learned about the 1919 White Sox scandal and is now full of doubts where all things baseball are concerned.
Day and Night Games by Arnold Friedman and Marjorie Phillips
New York-born artist Arnold Friedman (1874-1946) worked as a postal employee and also painted post office murals during the Great Depression's WPA Federal art program. Friedman later explored abstract and modernist realms, but his 1930s World Series painting has fine, light-filled impressionistic qualities. Friedman’s perspective from amid the crowd in the stands takes us right to the heart of the baseball experience, showing part of the mid-play field below, a sideline food vendor, and the round white tops of men’s summer straw hats from more formally-attired bygone days.
Artist Marjorie Phillips (1894-1985) was often taken out to the ballgame by her husband, art collector Duncan Phillips, though she wasn’t a huge baseball buff herself. She did enjoy people-watching and the spectacle of the sport, however, and her 1951 Night Baseball captured an evening meeting between the Washington Senators and the New York Yankees. The Yankees then had Joe DiMaggio in their lineup, recognizably depicted in Phillips’ painting, just as Phillips wonderfully framed a key moment of the inning itself along with the night sky, the surrounding lights, the crowd and DiMaggio's raised bat, waiting for the next pitch.
Elaine de Kooning's Baseball in Motion
Robert Rauschenberg and Jacob Lawrence also found baseball an intriguing subject, as did Abstract Expressionist Elaine de Kooning—another woman artist who took on the game. De Kooning actually traveled with the Yankees and Baltimore Orioles in 1953-54, and using a technique that gave a sense of motion to figurative depiction, she came up with a series of paintings that managed to convey the raw energy and power behind American baseball in one of its most exciting eras.
Sources
- Boy with Baseball, George Luks -- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Night Baseball, Marjorie Phillips -- The Phillips Collection
- Elaine de Kooning -- CLARA Database, National Museum of Women in the Arts
- National Baseball Hall of Fame -- Dressed to the Nines, A History of the Baseball Uniform
