Born less than a month apart in 1882, Hopper and Bellows were fellow students of Robert Henri, patriarch of the Ashcan School, an early-20th-century movement known for its gritty depictions of urban life.

WSJ: George Bellows at Washington's National Gallery of Art

For most of them, the show was meant to be an exhibition displaying the wide range of American modern art of the time, from the realism of the Ashcan School to the experiments of the Stieglitz-circle painters.

WSJ: The Forgotten Americans | The New Spirit: American Art in the Amory Show, 1913 | Montclair Art Museum | By James Panero

Henri's disciples were known collectively as the Ashcan School, partly because of the lowlife subjects they painted, but also because of the gritty, expressive handling of paint, which you can see in the swift brush strokes of "Forty-two Kids, " and Bellows's famous painting of an illicit prizefight, "Stag at Sharkey's" (1909).

WSJ: Review: Escape to New York | George Bellows at the Royal Academy in London