BARGEES
gouache and chalk on paper
57 x 74cm; 22 1/2 x 29in
67 x 84.5cm; 26 1/4 x 33 1/4in (framed)

Property from the Estate of a Gentleman

Provenance
Lilian Bomberg (née Holt), the artist's second wife (the painter Lilian Holt, 1898-1983, studied at Putney School of Art and Regent Street Polytechnic. She married Bomberg in 1929, and became a founder member of Borough Group, the collective of painters who had been influenced by Bomberg whilst he was teaching at Borough Polytechnic that formed in 1946 and disbanded in 1951. After Bomberg's death, Holt focused on her own work, traveling widely whilst continuing to promote Bomberg's legacy)
Acquired from Lilian Bomberg by the father of the present owner prior to 1975

Exhibited
Leicestershire Museums and Art Galleries (on loan from circa 1975)

Executed circa 1920, in the present work four rugged bargees concentrate on the task of steering their vessel along a canal. The silhouetted figure dominating the left foreground stands with his legs splayed for balance as he wields a large pole in his outstretched arms to manoeuvre the barge down stream. His fellow bargees to his right hold tight onto the mooring ropes as they lean backwards, using their body weight to steady the vessel as it pivots slowly round in the water.

Bargees who worked the waterways became an important theme for Bomberg at this time. The artist had first shown an interest in the subject when stationed in Flanders in the First World War. But as Richard Cork recounts, Bomberg's first wife Alice recalled how in the summer of 1919 Bomberg became captivated by the subject anew whilst they were out bicycling in the countryside and happened to cross a bridge over a canal. Seized by the scene before him 'four or five barges in line... we stood there for nearly an hour while he made his sketch and then we rode home...' (see: Richard Cork, Bomberg, London, 1988, p. 134). He also witnessed the life of the watermen and women who worked the Regent's Park Canal that snaked through north London. The result was a series of studies of barge workers and their families and at least two major oil paintings of similar size: Barges painted in a semi-fractured geometric style (collection of Tate), and a looser more expressive and gestural painting Barges on the Canal (private collection).

Cork argues that Bomberg's interest in bargees, who occupied a marginal place in society, reflected his own position as an artist who felt like an outsider, his work frequently misunderstood. Despite the success of the thrusting angular forms of his pre-War work, he had not fallen in with Wyndham Lewis, for which reason he had never been a Vorticist. Now, although he showed Barges at the 1919 London Group exhibition, he was conspicuous by his absence in the influential Group X exhibition at the Mansard Gallery the following year which featured the likes of William Roberts, Christopher Nevinson, Frederick Etchells and Frank Dobson. In truth Bomberg was looking for a new direction. His gruelling experiences in the trenches had sapped his energy for celebrating a dynamic, mechanised world. Rather he was searching for a gentler more thoughtful style and a subject matter to go with it. The gentle rhythms of the country's waterways and the slow moving pace of the Bargees who lived from it seemed a perfect place to start.