Bessie is a large-scale pencil and graphite drawing of silent cinema actress Bessie Love in the 1923 film Human Wreckage. One of Hollywood’s many ‘lost films’, no complete print of the finished film survives. The character assumed by Love is that of a morphine addict, and Fowler’s depiction encapsulates the violence and vulnerability of addiction. Love’s eyes subject the viewer to a doleful gaze. She seems to be on the verge of exposing her breast, and her left hand tightly grips the morphine needle, which protrudes from the picture plane in an example of the cut-out drawing technique employed by the artist, in Bessie this serves to embellish the image’s atmosphere of inherent violence. The viewer is confronted with a discomforting sense of reality in the subject’s three-dimensional presence. The monumental scale and beautifully rendered presence of Bessie has made this work one of the most profound images in Fowler’s portfolio, gracefully gesturing towards the tapestry of themes explored in her practice.