Bomberg arrived in Toledo in the September of 1929. He felt the need to escape England and it was his friend Muirhead Bone's enthusiasm for Spain, together with his admiration for El Greco's vision of the city that inspired the trip; he once told a friend 'I saw a bit of landscape in an El Greco and that persuaded me to visit Toledo'.

After some misgivings about the colours of Toledo in the autumn, Bomberg's twenty of so paintings of the city and the landscape around, were an unmitigated success. As Richard Cork (David Bomberg, London, 1987, pp.183-84) comments 'Some of Bomberg's most exhilarating Toledo pictures were executed on a modest scale, with great speed and concentration, on the outskirts of the city... some small paintings... follow the Tajo away from the city and make its zig-zag form affect the equally jerky rhythms of the hills around it... It is as if he were able to enliven the earth with his own impassioned apprehension of the scene. Buildings and landscape fuse into a single organism, which heaves and sways with Bomberg's powerful response to a scene not only scrutinised but seemingly touched and grasped as well'
(see ibid., pp.180-86)