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Bomberg travelled to Palestine in 1923 at the instigation of his friend Sir Muirhead Bone, who argued that the country should be seen ‘through the eyes of at least one imaginative artist as well as through the thousand cameras’ (M. Bone, quoted in S. MacDougall and R. Dickson, Bomberg, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London, 2017, p. 103). Backed by the Palestine Foundation Fund, Bomberg arrived in Jerusalem and began, for the first time, to paint en plein air.
Painted in his first year there, Mount Scopus and Government House possesses a lightness and airiness not always associated with Bomberg’s work. He pares the view down to its essentials. Pale hills sweep across the canvas beneath a soft grey sky, and from a cluster of white, terracotta-roofed houses in the foreground the eye is drawn up to the horizon, where the tower of the Augusta Victoria compound – then Government House, the residence of the British High Commissioner – stands alone. The brushwork is loose and unfettered: one can almost feel the sigh of relief from an artist who had known the trenches of the First World War and the poverty of London’s East End, and who had at last found room to breathe. Bomberg himself declared that he had ‘never seen the sunlight before’ (Bomberg, quoted in ibid., p. 104), and the present work seems to bask in it.
Much of Bomberg’s work in Palestine was conventional and naturalistic, in keeping with the brief he had been given. Here, however, a new freedom is already apparent in the open, confident handling of paint, in many ways anticipating the expressive landscapes of his later career. As Stephanie Rachum has written of this period, ‘Bomberg’s search for a personal expression of essence had begun’ (S. Rachum, ‘David Bomberg: Views from the Jewish-Zionist Side’, in David Bomberg in Palestine 1923-1927, exhibition catalogue, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1983, p. 24).
Purchased at Bomberg’s 1928 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries by Lt. Col. and Mrs Robert Solomon, this work records the moment Palestine first transformed his art.
Painted in his first year there, Mount Scopus and Government House possesses a lightness and airiness not always associated with Bomberg’s work. He pares the view down to its essentials. Pale hills sweep across the canvas beneath a soft grey sky, and from a cluster of white, terracotta-roofed houses in the foreground the eye is drawn up to the horizon, where the tower of the Augusta Victoria compound – then Government House, the residence of the British High Commissioner – stands alone. The brushwork is loose and unfettered: one can almost feel the sigh of relief from an artist who had known the trenches of the First World War and the poverty of London’s East End, and who had at last found room to breathe. Bomberg himself declared that he had ‘never seen the sunlight before’ (Bomberg, quoted in ibid., p. 104), and the present work seems to bask in it.
Much of Bomberg’s work in Palestine was conventional and naturalistic, in keeping with the brief he had been given. Here, however, a new freedom is already apparent in the open, confident handling of paint, in many ways anticipating the expressive landscapes of his later career. As Stephanie Rachum has written of this period, ‘Bomberg’s search for a personal expression of essence had begun’ (S. Rachum, ‘David Bomberg: Views from the Jewish-Zionist Side’, in David Bomberg in Palestine 1923-1927, exhibition catalogue, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1983, p. 24).
Purchased at Bomberg’s 1928 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries by Lt. Col. and Mrs Robert Solomon, this work records the moment Palestine first transformed his art.