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The retired heavyweight boxer "Sailor" Tom Sharkey ran "stags," that is, illegal prizefights for all-male audiences, in the cellar of his saloon at Broadway and 65th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. George Bellows's studio was across the street. An all-around athlete at Ohio State University, Bellows parlayed his knowledge of sports into paintings of boxing that displayed a new and unflinching realism. He frequented an informal group of artists, later dubbed the Ashcan School, who painted urban life on the unfashionable side of the street in early 1900s New York City.

In 1916, Bellows's interest turned to lithography, and he revisited his prizefight subjects, including his earlier painting titled A Stag at Sharkey's. In the translation from oil paint to lithographic crayon, Bellows expunged the colors of flesh and blood and burnished away detail under the white glare of the spotlights. He ennobled his two brawlers into a pair of sculpted warriors balancing at a point of momentary equilibrium. In the process, a brutal slice of New York City life metamorphosed into a classic all-American lithograph. For all its classical qualities, the print possesses the immediacy of a drawing made at ringside-the kind Bellows had once made as a newspaper sketch artist. The artist depicts himself here, the balding man half seen in the crowd on the far side of the ring bending over a sketch pad.

I don't know anything about boxing. I'm just painting two men trying to kill each other.
-George Bellows