George Wesley Bellows was born in 1882 in Columbus, Ohio. He attended The Ohio State University from 1901 until 1904. There he played for the baseball and basketball teams, and provided illustrations for the school's student yearbook. Bellows excelled at sports and was encouraged to become a professional baseball player while at school. He also worked as a commercial illustrator while a student , something he continued to do 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.

Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art and became associated with Henri's "The Eight”, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary American society in all its forms. By 1906, Bellows was painting constantly and renting his own studio. Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Robert Henri’s organized an exhibition. While many critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found them a talent beyond the work of their teacher and this led to Bellows being asked to instruct 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 both art teacher and artist.

Bellows' initial paintings depicted urban New York scenes of working-class people and neighborhoods and from 1907 through 1915, he executed a series of paintings depicting New York City under snowfall. These paintings helped Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture. However, Bellows' series of paintings portraying boxing matches were his most memorable.

Growing prestige as a painter brought changes in his life and work. His earlier themes slowed down as he 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.

At the same time that Bellows was experiencing fame and success from the New York establishment, the always socially conscious Bellows also associated himself with a group of radical artists and activists called "the Lyrical Left”, who tended towards anarchism in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He continued to teach throughout his life and taught at the first Modern School in New York City.

Bellows' later paintings focused more on domestic life, with his wife and daughters as his models. These paintings displayed a more theoretical approach to color and design, a departure from the fluidity of his early work.

In addition to painting, Bellows made significant contributions to lithography and helped to introduce it 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 and also illustrated numerous books in his later career, including several by H.G. Wells.