Art, literature & history
Polo Sketch
1921
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Medium
- lithograph
- Dimensions
- Image: 21 x 26.3 cm (8 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.)
- Collection no.
- 1936.640
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
George Bellows. Polo Sketch. George Bellows; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
About this artwork
Polo Sketch — George Bellows. 1921.
Medium: lithograph. Dimensions: Image: 21 x 26.3 cm (8 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.).
Collection record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
After witnessing his first polo match, Bellows described his fascination in a letter to his former English professor at Ohio State University: “I’ve been making studies of the wealthy game polo played by the ultra rich. And let me say these ultra rich have nerve tucked under their vest pocket. It’s an Aladdin’s lamp sort of game. You wish to be a hundred yards to your left, you kick your heels—and there you are. . . . The players are nice looking, moral looking. The horses are beautiful. I believe they brush their teeth and bathe them in goat’s milk. It is a great subject to draw.
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.