Richard Hamilton’s incisive contribution to the development of Pop art is well documented principally due to his celebrated collage Just What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? of 1956. In the light of this ground-breaking work, Hamilton settled into a rhythm of exploring a subject in a series of interrelated imageꦉs and often in differing media. The starting point crucially was often photography, which has provided Hamilton with a readymade source of imagery acting as a spring-board from which to launch his intellectual artistic projects.

The Greenham Common portfolio was conceived in 1984 and included a print by each of three artists, Jim Dine, Dieter Rot🎀h and Richard Hamilton. The proceeds from the sale of the portfolio went to a female faction within the nuclear disarmament movement. As he was searching for a suitable image to contribute to the portfolio, Hamilton remembered a photo given to him by an offset printer in 1969 whose subject had a suitable level of emotional charge. The present ♎watercolour was Hamilton’s first execution of this subject from which a composite print was made, and then subsequently an oil painting. Describing the genesis of the idea, Jacqueline Darby wrote:

``While working in Milan on t✤he first stage of ‘Fashion-plate’ in 1969, Hamilton was pressed, with typically Italian enthusiasm, by a young lithographic printer to go to his flat for a cup of coffee. They sat awkwardly, unable to communicate because neither spoke 🔯the other’s language. Then the Young Italian had an idea. He grasped his wallet and pulled out the quintessential photograph of his son by an indulgent father; the camera had focused on a smiling infant supported by his mother, whose head is chopped off by the frame. Hamilton, with genuine interest, said that the photograph was beautiful and the father immediately insisted that he should keep it.

The photograph remained in Hamilton’s studio for fifteen years, fading a little and getting dusty, until it began to assume its place among the genres as a ‘Mother and child’.’’ (quoted in Exhibition Catalogue: Richard Hamilton, Tate Gallery, 1992, p. 178).