From the aristocratic cricketers painted by Benjamin West to George Bellows's boxers and the baseball players that crowd the canvases of Jacob Lawrence, Andy Warhol, and hundreds of other painters, sports have played a central role in the drama of American art. It has long been common knowledge that Winslow Homer portrayed hunters and fishermen as well as croquet players in his work and that Thomas Eakins was obsessed by the muscular male bodies of...