"Cliff Dwellers" is a famous work by George Bellows, created in 1913. This oil on canvas painting depicts a colorful crowd in the Lower East Side of New York on a hot summer day. The painting measures approximately 102 cm x 107 cm and is currently housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1916.

This work is a representative example of the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century American art movement that favored realistic depictions of urban subjects. In "Cliff Dwellers," people come out of apartment buildings to fill the streets, stairs, and scaffolding, while laundry dries above them and a street vendor sells his goods from his cart in the middle of the traffic. In the background, a streetcar heads toward Vesey Street.

The painting was created using a color system promoted by Hardesty Gillmore Maratta, a paint manufacturer and color theorist. Bellows began using this system around 1909 or 1910. According to art historian Michael Quick, "Cliff Dwellers" was his most complex exploration of the Maratta color system, containing three color harmonies used in different areas of the painting.

The painting also reflects the new face of New York between 1870 and 1915, a period during which the city's population grew from one and a half million to five million, largely due to immigration. Many of these newcomers, including Italians, Jews, Irish, and Chinese, crowded into tenement houses in the Lower East Side.