David Bomberg travelled widely in the 1920s and 1930s, notably to Palestine and Spain, producing some of his greatest landscape paintings as well as a series of revealing self portraits and portraits of family members. The present work was created in 1935 and is a study for the major oil ‘Street Scene Ronda, with the Church of the Virgin of la Paz’. A secondary support sketch in charcoal of the mirror image to be found on the reverse of this work is in the collection of the Pallant House Gallery. Writing with regards to the principle oil of the same composition, Richard Cork notes how “Bomberg depicts the junction of two narrow streets in an ancient part of the town…The long shadows and the looming darkness of the sky suggest he painted the scene at the end of the day and contribute to the disquieting mood of the picture. This feeling is heightened by the strangely distorted perspective of the buildings and the tension between the illusionistic space created within the picture and the material substance of the painting itself, which draws attention to the flat picture plane.” (catalogue to David Bomberg: Spirit in the mass – Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 2006). The present work is actually double sided. Bomberg completed a second study of the same view (albeit a mirror image using the dark outlines of the buildings to frame the reverse composition) with the scene set in strong daylight as opposed to the crepuscular view seen on the principal image.