Zahara (recto); Self-Portrait (verso)

In February 1954 Bomberg and his wife, Lilian returned to their beloved Ronda to Villa Paz intending to set up a painting school 'offering a summer and winter course annually in Spain for students of all countries in painting, sculpture, and architecture and others in the profession of the visual arts'. The painting school failed as the owners refused to effect repairs to the crumbling but beautiful old building, and eventually cut off the electricity and water, as they preferred to let the villa to wealthier tenants. Bomberg and Lilian moved into a nearby flat and undetered, continued to roam the Spanish countryside by donkey finding suitable locations for paintings and drawings.

While the Spanish landscape provided the inspiration for a late surge of paintings and drawings between 1954 and 1956, Bomberg also began a series of self-portraits, several bearing biblical titles as invocations, such as 'Hear Oh Israel', 1955 (private collection), and 'Vigilante', 1955 (Tate Gallery, London). By 1955 and 'Last Self-Portrait' (private collection), painted in 1956, the shawl that covers the artist's shoulders in the present work, becomes a head-dress over his bowed head, producing a 'powerful image of the mystery and inwardness that mere looking cannot penetrate'.
(see J. Spurling, David Bomberg The Later Years, Whitechapel Art Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 1979, p.5).