Diagram of a fireplace hand bellows.

A bellows is a device for delivering pressurized air in a controlled quantity to a controlled location.

Basically, a bellows is a deformable container which has an outlet nozzle. When the volume of the bellows is decreased, the air escapes through the outlet. A bellows may have a separate air inlet and check valves or flaps to ensure that air enters only through the inlet and exits only through the outlet; the nozzle may be very close to a fire and dangerously hot air.

Hand-made English fireplace bellows

Metallurgy[link]

Several processes, such as metallurgical iron smelting and welding, require so much heat that they could only be developed after the invention of the bellows. The bellows are used to deliver additional air to the fuel, raising the rate of combustion and therefore the heat output.

Various kinds of bellows are used in metallurgy:

• Box bellows were and are traditionally used in Asia. (1)
• Pot bellows were used in ancient Egypt. (2)
• Tatara foot bellows from Japan.
• Accordion bellows, with the characteristic pleated sides, have been used in Europe for many centuries. (3)
• Piston bellows were developed in the middle of the 18th century in Europe (4). However, the double action piston bellows were utilised by the Han rulers in ancient China as early as the 3rd century BCE (5).
• Metal bellows were made to absorb axial movement in a dynamic condition. Often referred to as Axial Dynamics bellow types (6)

The Han Dynasty Chinese mechanical engineer Du Shi (d. 38) is credited with being the first to apply hydraulic power, through a waterwheel, to operate bellows in metallurgy. His invention was used to operate piston bellows of blast furnaces in order to forge cast iron.^[1] The ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, and other civilizations used bellows in bloomery furnaces producing wrought iron. Bellows are also used to send pressurized air in a controlled manner in a fired heater.

In modern industry, reciprocating bellows are usually replaced with motorized blowers.

Two-chambered forge bellows[link]

The most common type of bellows used by blacksmiths for delivering air to the forge. Preferred for their near constant stream of air, they are typically constructed similarly to fireplace bellows, but made with a two-section accordion, allowing for two chambers separated by a central divider. They are mounted by the middle paddle, and air is drawn in through the bottom chamber, then forced into the upper, which has a constant rate of exhaust due to a weight or spring pushing down.

Double-acting piston bellows[link]

Double-acting piston bellows are a type of bellows used by blacksmiths and smelters to increase the air flow going into the forge, with the property that air is blown out on both strokes of the handle (in contrast to simpler and more common bellows that blow air when the stroke is in one direction and refill the bellows in the other direction). These bellows blow a more constant, and thus stronger, blast than simple bellows.^[2] Such bellows existed in China at least since the 5th century BCE, when it was invented, and had reached Europe by the 16th century.^[3]

A piston is enclosed in a rectangular box with a handle coming out one side. The piston edges are covered with feathers, fur, or soft paper to ensure that it is airtight and lubricated. As the piston is pulled, air from one side enters and flows through the nozzle and as it is pushed air enters from the opposite side and flows through the same nozzle.^[2]

Further applications[link]

• Bellows are widely used in industrial and mechanical applications such as rod boots, machinery way covers, lift covers and rail covers to protect rods, bearings and sealings from dirt.
• Bellows are widely used on articulated buses and trams, to cover the joint where the vehicle bends.
• Bellows are an essential part of anesthesia machines.
• Bellows tubing, a type of lightweight, flexible, extensible tubing may be used for delivery of gas or air at near-ambient pressure, as in early aqua-lung designs.
• Cuckoo clocks use bellows to blow air through their gedackt (pipes) and imitate the call of the Common Cuckoo bird.
• Folding cameras, such as early Polaroid models and some early Kodak Retina and Retinette cameras, used bellows to exclude light while allowing the lens to be moved relative to the film plane for focusing. View cameras also employ bellows to keep the light-path dark while allowing the lens and tail boards to tilt and shift relative to one another.
• Musical instruments may employ bellows as a substitute or regulator for air pressure provided by the human lungs:
  • melodeon, concertina and related instruments
  • Reed organ
  • Pipe organ
  • Musette de cour and some other varieties of bagpipes
  • Harmonium and melodeon
  • Portative
• Piping expansion joint: In this application, bellows are formed in series to absorb thermal movement and vibration in piping systems that transport high temperature media such as exhaust gases or steam. (8)

• SEALED-BELLOW.JPG

  Urethane bellows

• 

  A large bellows creates a mushroom cloud at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California.

See also[link]

• Sylphon for uses of metal bellows in experimental physics and engineering.

References[link]

Notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

• http://www.archaeogate.org/egittologia/article/182/8/mersa-gawasis-red-sea-egypt-unoisiao-and-bu-2003-2004-f.html .
• Gernet, Jacques, trans. by J. R. Foster (1972): A History of Chinese Civilization, Cambridge University Press.
• http://www.oakridgebellows.com (How a Bellows Works)

External links[link]

Look up bellows in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bellows

• http://www.wwmag.net/blacksmith.htm for bellows used in primitive blacksmithing.
• http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Bellows for a general discussion of bellows in metal work.

George Bellows
George Bellows
Birth name	George Wesley Bellows
Born	August 12, or August 19, 1882 Columbus, Ohio
Died	January 8, 1925(1925-01-08) (aged 42) New York City
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Movement	Ashcan School, The Eight, American realism
Influenced by	Robert Henri

George Wesley Bellows (August 12^[1][2] or August 19,^[3][4][5] 1882 - January 8, 1925) was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".^[6]

Youth[link]

George Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He was an only child, born four years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty and forty respectively.^[7] His mother, Anna Wilhelmina Smith, was the daughter of a whaling captain.^[7]

Bellows attended The Ohio State University from 1901 until 1904. There he played for the baseball and basketball teams, and provided illustrations for the Makio, the school's student yearbook. He was encouraged to become a professional baseball player,^[8] and he worked as a commercial illustrator while a student and he continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life. Despite these opportunities in athletics and commercial art, Bellows desired success as a painter. He left Ohio State in 1904 just before he was to graduate and moved to New York City to study art.^[8]

Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, and became associated with Henri's "The Eight" and the Ashcan School, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary American society in all its forms.^[8] By 1906, Bellows was renting his own studio, on Broadway.^[9]

New York[link]

Cliff Dwellers, (1913), Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. While many critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found them welcomely audacious and a step beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter. His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.

New York (1911), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Bellows' urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods, and also satirized the upper classes. From 1907 through 1915, he executed a series of paintings depicting New York City under snowfall. These paintings were the main testing ground in which Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture.^[10] These exhibited a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and grimy surfaces of city structures, and created an aesthetically ironic image of the equally rough and grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the pure snow. However, Bellows' series of paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his signature contribution to art history.^[8] These paintings are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly lain brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction.

Social and political themes[link]

Both Members of This Club (1909)
Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 63 1/8 in. (115 x 160.5 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Growing prestige as a painter brought changes in his life and work. Though he continued his earlier themes, Bellows also began to receive portrait commissions, as well as social invitations, from New York's wealthy elite. Additionally, he followed Henri's lead and began to summer in Maine, painting seascapes on Monhegan and Matinicus islands.

At the same time, the always socially conscious Bellows also associated with a group of radical artists and activists called "the Lyrical Left", who tended towards anarchism in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at the first Modern School in New York City (as did his mentor, Henri), and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal, The Masses, to which he contributed many drawings and prints beginning in 1911. However, he was often at odds with the other contributors because of his belief that artistic freedom should trump any ideological editorial policy. Bellows also notably dissented from this circle in his very public support of U.S. intervention in World War I. In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and paintings that graphically depicted the atrocities committed by Germany during its invasion of Belgium. Notable among these was The Germans Arrive, which was based on an actual account and gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a Belgian teen whose hands had just been severed. However, his work was also highly critical of the domestic censorship and persecution of anti-war dissenters conducted by the U.S. government under the Espionage Act.

He was also criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war. The artist Joseph Pennell argued that because Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he had no right to paint them. Bellows responded that he had not been aware that Leonardo da Vinci had "had a ticket to paint the Last Supper".^[11]

Dempsey and Firpo (1924), Whitney Museum of American Art

Later life[link]

As Bellows' later oils focused more on domestic life, with his wife and daughters as beloved subjects, the paintings also displayed an increasingly programmatic and theoretical approach to color and design, a marked departure from the fluid muscularity of the early work.

In addition to painting, Bellows made significant contributions to lithography, helping to expand the use of the medium as a fine art in the U.S. He installed a lithography press in his studio in 1916, and between 1921 and 1924 he collaborated with master printer Bolton Brown on more than a hundred images. Bellows also illustrated numerous books in his later career, including several by H.G. Wells.

Bellows taught at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919. In 1920, he began to spend nearly half of each year in Woodstock, New York, where he built a home for his family.^[12] He died on January 8, 1925 in New York City, of peritonitis, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix.^[13] He was survived by his wife, Emma, and two daughters, Anne and Jean. Bellows is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Paintings and prints by George Bellows are in the collections of many major American art museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, and the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, NY. The Columbus Museum of Art in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and New York street scenes. The White House acquired his 1919 painting "Three Children" in 2007, and it is now displayed in the Green Room.

The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds his papers.

Posthumous sales[link]

In December 1999, Polo Crowd, a 1910 painting, sold for U.S. $27.5 million to billionaire Bill Gates.^[14] In November 2008, Bellows's Men of the Docks a 1912 painting of the Brooklyn docks spanning the East River and depicting the Manhattan skyline in the background, was to be auctioned at Christie's in New York. It was expected to set the record for an American painting sold at auction with an estimate of $25–35 million.^[15] The painting's sale however was a source of controversy at Randolph College because it was the first masterpiece purchased for the Maier Museum of Art by students and locals who scraped together $2,500 to purchase it in 1920.^[16] Due to a series of lawsuits and the deflated art market; the painting remains unsold. ^[17]

Randolph College was asked by the National Gallery of Art ^[18] in Washington, D.C. to lend its painting "Men of the Docks" (1912) for the first comprehensive exhibition of the Bellow’s prolific career in three decades. The National Gallery believes that the College’s painting is an important addition to the retrospective and has requested that the College lend its painting to the exhibition. "Men of the Docks" will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. June 10-Oct. 8, 2012; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Nov. 14, 2012-Feb. 18, 2013; and the Royal Academy of Arts in London March 16-June 9, 2013.

See also[link]

• American realism
• Ashcan school
• Logan Medal of the arts

References[link]

Selected works[link]

• 

  Central Park (1905)

• 

  Pennsylvania Station Excavation (1907)

• 

  Steaming Streets (1908)

• 

  Blue Morning, (1909)

• 

  Blue Snow the Battery (1910)

• 

  A Morning Snow Hudson River (1910)

• 

  Evening Blue (1913)

• 

  Emma at the Piano, (1914)

• 

  A Grandmother, 1914. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

• 

  Builders of Ships, (1916)

• 

  Breaking Sky, Monhegan, (ca. 1916)

• 

  Edith Cavell (1918)

• 

  Emma at the Window (1920)

• 

  Emma in a Purple Dress (1920-23), Dallas Museum of Art

• 

  Katherine Rosen, (1921)

• 

  Self-portrait, (1921), Lithograph

• 

  Summer Fantasy (1924)

• 

  Lady Jean, (portrait of Bellows' daughter Jean), 1924, Yale University Art Gallery

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Wesley Bellows

• Artcyclopedia list of works by George Bellows online
• An American Pulse: The Lithographs of George Bellows, San Diego Museum of Art
• The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library, exhibited at the Frick
• George Bellows Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
• The Boston Public Library's George Wesley Bellows set on Flickr.com
• Bellows Papers, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
• The Barricade at the Birmingham Museum of Art