George Hay (born 1876) is an author about whose life very little is publicly known; his nationality, education and professional career cannot be reliably established. What can be confirmed is that two works by him survive, one devoted to the Italian painter Bellini and the other to Carlo Dolci. Judging from these subjects, his writing centred on Western art history, particularly the painting traditions of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, and he tended to organise his accounts around individual painters. Such artist-centred studies usually combine biographical narrative with commentary on particular works, allowing readers to approach a period and its artistic context through a single figure. Although his output was small and the circulation of his books remains to be examined, these two works offer Chinese readers useful texts for understanding Bellini and Dolci as artists, and they constitute the main trace he has left in the field of art-historical writing.
