A book I once read about “being an artist” explained the importance of making time for artist days. That’s a day you set aside specifically for soaking up whatever it is that inspires you. It could be a movie or a trip to the woods or a day hanging out with a sketchbook or a good long time at a museum. And that’s what you need if you go to the Met in New York: a good. Long. Time.

But if you can’t set aside the two solid weeks of dedicated effort it would take to really absorb the museum and its contents just once (never mind that something changes nearly every week), an afternoon is better than nothing. And that’s what Sorgatz (who I share a studio with) and I did a couple weeks ago. First stop was lunch at Soup Burg on Lexington. You like burgers? Go. Let’s not argue about this. Just go. Next stop, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Ave.

There’s never a shortage of things to see there, but we kept it simple: the hearty Matisse exhibit, a good bit of post-war American art (Pollack, Stuart Davis, etc.), and the “Regarding Warhol” exhibit. But that was all just gravy. I was there for Mr. George Bellows.

In short, he came to New York from Ohio in 1904 and went on to become one fo the finest realist painters of his day, a member of NYC’s Ashcan School, renowned for their depiction of everyday scenes of their day. Bellows started out strong, winning prizes and acclaim with his oil on canvas depictions of frosty winter river paintings and boxers brutalizing each other in dives like Sharkey’s near his apartment on 66th and Broadway, where the Julliard School now sits. Back in the early 1900s, it wasn’t quite so swanky. Robert Moses mowed it all down in the 1950s calling it “slum clearance” and dug the hole for Lincoln Center, but that’s another whole fascinating story.

So Bellows loved to paint the peripheries of New York City, literally and figuratively. He preferred depicting the river fronts to downtown, and the lives of the lower classes as well as (on occasion) the upper crust. The Met exhibit excels in showing you his process, and below you can see how he went from initial sketches to a final painting: 1913’s The Cliff Dwellers.

I especially love the cartoon quality of his sketches and the third study. The art of cartoony exaggeration lies behind many a masterpiece. He painted so many sides of New York: night scenes, riverscapes, construction sites, sports, “street urchins,” and plenty of upper-crust portraits. Then, just as he seemed to be entering a new phase during the ascent of art deco and the pure American rush of the Jazz Age in New York: pfft. He was gone. Ruptured appendix at age 42. We lost a great one, there. But he left a fine legacy.

George Bellows, ladies and gentlemen! Check him out at the Met through February 18.