As a young artist, Frank Bowling's early work reflected the dominant currents of the British art landscape of the early 1960s, when expressive figuration, Pop Art, and post-colonial themes were widely explored. During this formative period, Bowling developed his individual language of painting, and his work was shown in key exhibitions, such as The Obsessive Image, 1960-1969 at the ICA, alongside artists such as Francis Bacon and David Hockney.

4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1961, was created in Bowling's second year at the Royal College of Art. This photograph shows Bowling in the life room at the Royal College of Art where he spent a lot of his time refining his drawing and painting skills.

In 1968, Frank Bowling travelled to Guyana with cinematographer Tina Tranter to film a BBC-commissioned documentary. In his proposal, Bowling described the film as exploring “the influence of the ‘Land’ on a potentially creative personality”. Although the project was never completed, the archive holds photographic documentation and film footage from the trip, capturing Guyana’s people, landscape, and waterways.

For many years, the footage was stored in a tea-chest in Bowling’s Brooklyn studio, while photographs from the journey were pinned on his studio walls and used as sources of inspiration. The image shown here depicts a river sluice near the Berbice River. Bowling spent his childhood in New Amsterdam, a port town situated directly on the river’s banks, where water and landscape were central to daily life. Guyana’s waterscape served as inspiration for his series of poured paintings, where he engages with water as a dynamic living force, manipulating thin layers of diluted paint across the surface of the canvas.

Many of Frank Bowling’s paintings draw from real-life experiences, including the Beggars series, of which Beggar No.5, 1962-66, displayed at the Fitzwilliam, is an example. As a child, Bowling was instructed by his mother, known as ‘Chrissie’, to wash the feet of beggars before he was allowed to eat his dinner.

In 1968, during a trip to Guyana with cinematographer Tina Tranter, Bowling filmed his mother feeding and washing the hands of beggars at her shop, Bowling’s Variety Store, which also served as the family home. In his Artists’ Lives oral history interview with Mel Gooding, Bowling explained that he wanted to record this scene because it was both a significant subject for his painting and an important part of his life. The image shown here is a still from this footage, depicting Chrissie washing a beggar’s hands at the family shop.

Surrounding the land in which Lenoraseas, 1976 bears the name of the village of Leonora in Essequibo Islands-West Demerara, Guyana, were the bodies of water that transported sugar from the Leonora sugar plantation to Europe.

Bowling made Lenoraseas, 1976 as part of his series of poured paintings, in which he poured, dripped and moved acrylic paint over canvas to produce dynamic and colourful works that call back to the landscape of Guyana. Guyana has been referred to as the Land of Many Waters. This photograph, taken in Bowling's London studio in 2026, shows a selection of acrylic paints and other materials that Bowling uses daily in his work. The fluidity of acrylic paint that inspired him in the 1970s is still a major part of his practice today.

The title of the painting on display at the Fitzwilliam Pondlife (After Millais), 2007 is a reference to English pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais and a potential nod to his famous work Ophelia, 1851-52. Bowling has been influenced by a great deal of Western masters including J.M.W Turner who represented landscapes in a tempestuous and pensive dance between memory and emotion. In his paintings, Bowling explores a medley of circumstance and a dance with time - teeming with a complex array of life, much like a pond.

Bowling also drew on Western masters in his teachings, using their work to explore ideas of colour, composition, and painterly technique with his students. The archive preserves the slides he used in lectures, offering insight into the visual references that informed both his teaching and his own artistic practice. Bowling held several teaching posts during his career, including at Camberwell School of Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and the Byam Shaw School of Art

Tracey’s Bouquet (At Swim Two Birds), 2011 has three marouflage borders, a technique that is an integral component of Frank Bowling’s practice. The term marouflage is used by Bowling to describe the process of attaching strips of canvas to the edges of a painting. These additions often extend across three or more sides, framing a larger central canvas.

The image shows scraps of leftover marouflage material preserved in the Frank Bowling Archive. The Archive cares for a wide range of materials related to Bowling’s working methods and studio practice.

The swan and geometry are two themes that Bowling has returned to throughout his career. While a young man in Guyana, Bowling learned draughting and formal drawing before continuing his training in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This fragment of paper shows a number of geometric calculations drawn by someone other than Bowling, with annotations added perhaps at the time or at a later date by the artist. The archive holds a number of fragments like this and also books on the topic of geometry.

Swan: Geometric Observation I, 1965 is one in a series of lithograph prints produced by Bowling. Some of the prints have annotations and additional paint experiments. The annotations relate to maths, geometry or personal dedications to friends, such as Jack O’Connell. Bowling studied geometry and formalism through Hambidge’s The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry and the mathematics of Fibonacci. The diamond shape of the central image is a similar arrangement to the Swan paintings that Bowling produced in 1964.

While he was a tutor at Camberwell College of Art in the 1960s Frank Bowling produced a number of silk screens in collaboration with the textile department. Included in this series of screens was a photograph of his mother, a photograph of Bowling’s Variety Store and a map of South America with text. The original silk screen of the outline of South America now belongs to Bowling’s archive and was photographed and remade again by the print department at Camberwell College of Art in 2025 on the occasion of Bowling’s participation in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. Bowling wanted to revisit his seminal map paintings series to reflect this return to the continent of South America and it was discovered, coincidentally, that the original silk screen included the words São Paulo.

This photograph, taken by Frank Bowling’s friend, photographer Tina Tranter, shows Bowling standing on the edge of the River Thames in Putney behind two swans. Bowling has previously told a story about how he once saw a swan struggling at the edge of the River Thames, caught up in oil and debris and identified deeply with the swan’s plight. This photograph shows Bowling’s fascination and personal connection with swans at the time.

In 1964, the year the photograph was taken, Bowling produced a number of paintings on the theme of the swan in his studio in London. The swans in these works were dying, struggling, flapping - a metaphor for how Bowling felt and the conflicts in his life, between the life of an artist and his domestic responsibilities. In the painting, Bowling plays with geometry and form through the representation of a figurative swan, though abstracted and struggling.

In the 1950s and 60s, before Guyana gained independence from the United Kingdom, the country produced airmail envelopes featuring a photograph of Kaieteur Falls. This waterfall is on the Potaro River in Guyana and is one of the most powerful single-drop waterfalls in the world. This letter from 1959 was sent to Frank Bowling by his mother, Agatha ‘Chrissie’ Bowling and was written on one of these airmail envelopes.

While Bowling never visited the waterfall in the south of Guyana, a familiarity with this visual has been cemented in his imagination. The title of this work, Potarospray, 1980 seems to be a direct reference to this powerful movement of water. The photograph of the envelope also visually invokes Bowling’s interest in pouring and flowing paint, as seen in his poured paintings of the 1970s (for example, Lenoraseas, 1976 which is on display in the Octagon Room).