[9] His mother was the daughter of a whaling captain based in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and his family returned there for their summer vacations.

He was encouraged to become a professional baseball player,[11] and he worked as a commercial illustrator while a student and continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life.

While studying there, Bellows 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.

Bellows' urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods, and satirized the upper classes.

In these paintings Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture,[15] exhibiting a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and grimy surfaces of city structures, and creating an aesthetically ironic image of the equally rough and grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the pure snow.

[11] They are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly laid brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction.

Though he continued his earlier themes, Bellows also began to receive portrait commissions, as well as social invitations, from New York's wealthy elite.

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, his work was also highly critical of the domestic censorship and persecution of antiwar dissenters conducted by the U.S. government under the Espionage Act.

[16] 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.

The Fisherman (1917), a significant late canvas focusing on the topic that he made while visiting Carmel, California, is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art holds one of the largest collections of Bellows' lithographs, a set of 220 prints acquired from the artist's estate in 1985.

In November 2021, the Columbus Museum of Art opened the George Bellows Center to encourage exhibitions, publications and scholarly research on his life and work.