Jim Dine (b. 1935)

Involved in Pop Art in the 1960s, Jim Dine depicted a range of domestic items in his works, including ties, shoes, basins and toothbrushes. The image of a man’s bathrobe, voluminous, sleeves akimbo, was borrowed from a 1964 advertisement in The New York Times Magazine Section; it had a sudden and personal appeal to Dine, who stated he ‘was going to use it arbitrarily but suddenly it looked as though it had me in it’. Throughout his oeuvre, the artist revisited this autobiographical image again and again, recreating it in a wide variety of techniques. In Barrow Street Robe II, Dine conjures up the motif in richly-coloured, vigorous brushwork, which serves to highlight its emotive connotations, while two footprints reveal the spontaneity of the artist’s working method.