Lot Essay
‘Beggar No. 3 features, for the first time, and the only time to my knowledge, a painted image of his mother’s house, rather than the haunting silkscreened images in later paintings like Cover Girl (1966). One of Bowling’s most significant recurrent motifs, an emblematic acknowledgment of T.S. Eliot’s psychologically fraught line: ‘Home is where one starts from.’ It was the house to which Bowling brought the beggar children on the streets of New Amsterdam to be fed by his imperious and charitable mother.’
- Mel Gooding