Born in Birmingham to a Polish Jewish family, Bomberg's education began in earnest with a move to London in 1905 and evening classes under Walter Bayes at the City & Guilds. He was fortunate to study under Walter Sickert at the Central School of Art and Westminster College, before joining the ranks of the 'golden generation' at the Slade School. Before World War I he worked for a period at Roger Fry's Omega Workshop and he travelled to Paris, meeting Picasso, Derain and Modigliani.

It was during this time that he attracted the attention of Wyndham Lewis who invited him into the Vorticist fold. Bomberg exhibited alongside the Vorticists at the Dore Gallery (London) but never became a formal member of the group. Bomberg also exhibited with the Camden Town Group and was a founding member of the London Group. The war was to have a profound effect on the artist and his work, as it did to many of his contemporaries, and after the cessation of violence he pulled back from the near abstraction of his earlier work to a more figurative and expressionist style. Bomberg travelled widely in the 1920s and 1930s, notably to Palestine and Spain, producing some of his greatest landscape paintings.

In the summer of 1934, Bomberg reached Cuenca. He had visited Spain before; his work having undergone the heavy influence of the Spanish masters, particularly El Greco, in Toledo in 1929. Cuenca, an ancient settlement on a limestone spur high above the Júcar and Huécar rivers, inspired Bomberg who worked confidently and energetically both inside and out of the city walls. Richard Cork has noted that Bomberg’s time there marks an apogee of experimentation, the city and surrounding panoramas emboldening the artist towards freer expression. Whilst the present drawing expresses a relatively literal depiction of the Spanish townscape, the loose linearity of the cliff demarcations clearly anticipates Bomberg’s ‘franker declaration of his subjective reaction to the landscape’.

In 1946 Bomberg became the inspiration behind the formation of the Borough Group, which later became the Borough Bottega. The Borough Group centred on those figures taught by Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. He was an inspirational figure for many post-war figurative painters, including Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach who had attended his classes. Bomberg returned to Spain in 1954, but his stay was relatively short. He passed away in London on 19th August, 1957. The Tate Gallery held a major retrospective of the artist work in 1988. A major touring retrospective, curated by the Ben Uri Gallery and opening at the Pallant House Gallery, opened in October 2017, supported by a new monograph.