Cuenca facing west

Bomberg and his wife Lilian returned to Spain in 1934, travelling to Cuenca during the summer. The conditions here appealed: Spain was very cheap and the canvases that Bomberg had painted in Toledo in the winter of 1929 had been well received by his wealthy patrons in the north of England. Living and working in the city of Cuenca would enable him to produce his best work as the landscape so suited his painting style. Richard Cork (David Bomberg, London, 1987, p. 203) records, 'Cuenca, built high on a ridge of rock with rivers on each side, is a dramatic sight. Bomberg regained the old sense of excitement as he approached it, in a painting called The Road to the city Cuenca [private collection] where the brushstrokes were applied like driving strokes of rain. Cuenca was an ancient settlement, and Bomberg honoured its sense of history by renting a house for the equivalent of a few pence a week in the old part of the city near the cathedral. As in Toledo and Palestine, he painted outdoors as frequently as possible. From the end of the garden there was a precipitous descent to the valley below, and several Cuenca paintings dramatize the apparent vulnerability of the old buildings clustered on the edge of the ravine'.