Bargee Man (recto); Portrait of Leo Koenig by Lilian Bomberg (verso)

The idea for a barge series came to Bomberg on a cycling trip with Alice, his first wife, one afternoon in the summer of 1919. They encountered a line of four or five barges lined up for the night with willow trees throwing shadows over the riverbank. Alice later recalled that Bomberg 'literally fell off his bike ... I suppose we were there for nearly an hour while he made his sketch and then we rode home, and he spent some time brooding over the drawing he had made on the back of an envelope'. A series of watercolours depicting the barge families, or 'bargees', ensued in which Bomberg began to explore the theme of the outsider, as he believed that the bargees, like himself, occupied only a marginal place in society.
(see R. Cork, David Bomberg, London, 1987, p.134).