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Orphaned early, Eduard Bargheer was first able to assert himself against his older brother and begin his artistic education on his own when he was over the age of 20. Friedrich AhlersHestermann (1883-1973) supported him in Hamburg. A portrait order in 1925 enabled Bargheer to make a long-awaited stay in Italy, and only a year later the public art gallery in Hamburg purchased its first painting from him. The young artist’s success in his hometown reached a plateau with a solo gallery exhibition and his participation in the annual presentation of the Hamburg Secessonists. He was able to open up his own atelier in his home village of Finkenwerder on the Elbe to the south of Hamburg, and his friendships with the painter Gretchen Wohlwill as well as the Warburg und Panofsky families deepened his art historical education. A fellowship from the city of Hamburg enabled him to make a study visit to Paris for several months in 1932; through the photographer Herbert List, he came to know southern Italy, and in Bern he befriended Paul Klee, who repeatedly invited him in subsequent years to come to his atelier. In 1935, Bargheer moved to Hamburg-Blankenese and rented a prestigious studio in the city center on the Jungfernstieg. In 1939, however, he left Nazi Germany in the direction of Forio; in the same year, his pictures were denounced as degenerate. Bargheer returned to Hamburg first in the winter months of 1950, and took up a teaching position at the College of Fine Arts there in 1957. A guest professorship at the University of the Arts in Berlin followed in 1963.
Throughout the 1960s, Eduard Bargheer undertook several journeys to North and Central Africa, which led to considerable artistic engagements and finally to a maturity of style. Many of his works on paper, which were transportable during such tours and did not take long to dry, originated while he was on the road. This portrait study likely also emerged from the Arabic north of the African continent, as the image suggests.