As the country recharges after our great national pastime of the NFL Superbowl, we are excited to offer this splendid and exceptionally rare oil painting by Benton Spruance. The subject matter is timely, as the artist’s lifelong home was Philadelphia, whose team rivaled Kansas City in last weekend’s big game. Given that the Eagles were founded in 1933, odds are that Spruance’s players featured in this 1934 painting are the Philadelphia Eagles’ first team. Often referred to as “the football artist” during his lifetime, Spruance was described in the local paper Germantown Courier: “Spruance did for football what George Bellows did for boxing.” Spinner Play, also rendered in a lithograph, makes effective use of vivid reds, and the dynamic, rhythmically curving figures are characteristic of Spruance’s football subjects.
In his biography of the artist, Lloyd M. Abernethy, said of Spruance: “He found and conveyed an excitement in the physical clash of sinuous bodies and a rhythm in the patterns of play that other artists had not yet discovered.”
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