Tennis

During the late 1910s, while summer vacationing with his family in the small town of Middletown, Rhode Island, Bellows took time to attend tennis matches hosted nearby at the Newport Casino, a mecca for high-society locals and visitors. In two resultant lithographs, Tennis and The Tournament, greater emphasis is placed on the fashionable spectators assembled to watch the matches than on the sporting activity itself. Bellows appears to imply that at such elite gatherings, audiences were present not only to see, but to be seen.