Description

Although Riggs supported himself by working as an illustrator for Fortune, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and other popular magazines, he began making lithographs in 1932 and enjoyed printmaking into the late 1940s. Because he liked pageantry, crowds, noise, and the atmosphere of smoke-filled interiors illuminated by harsh, bright lights, Riggs depicted the circus or boxing ring with a stark, gritty realism. Perhaps Riggs was interested in boxing scenes because of George Bellows’s print of 1916, Stag at Sharkeys, which he might have seen at an exhibition of the artist’s lithographs at the Print Club in Philadelphia, where he lived.