The eventful year of 1963 included Marr relocating to a small cottage at Higher Chuggaton, near Barnstaple, in North Devon. It was a joint decision with Lynn; both of them had been living in London for some time and needed change. The fresh landscape proved fruitful for Marr, who set about recording his responses to the stark, sweeping views from the cottage over the Devon countryside, beginning a period during which some of his best mature work was produced. Sitting at the heart of this period, Chuggaton, Devon (1965) takes a view from the cottage at sunset, the distant horizon line marked out by the day’s last burnished bronze light glowing through layers of cloud. Thick, fluid impasto carries motion across the canvas, flowing between Marr’s perception of natural phenomena. ‘Landscape to me is a living thing,’ he later declared, ‘full of mysterious energies’. The unsettling convulsive quality of this diminutive but potently energetic work associates it with Soutine’s early landscapes at Céret, which Marr had seen at the Tate Gallery two years previously. The introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue, written by David Sylvester with whom Marr was familiar, aided his thinking around landscape and his shared project with Soutine. Sylvester quoted lines from D.H. Lawrence’s description of a Cézanne scene: ‘It has its own weird anima… it changes like a living animal under our gaze’.56 According to Marr, Lawrence’s statement ‘provides a clue to what Bomberg actually meant by spirit in the mass’ and yet Marr’s subjective interpretation and assimilation of these influences is unique. In his essay, Sylvester wrote of how ‘the animation, and this alone, is enough to generate the metaphors, the allusions, the ambiguities of reference, in this, or any, Soutine. Forms with metamorphic implications are the stock-in-trade of modern art.’ This sense of metamorphosis, landscape shifting or flowers fighting back against our sight, is what is most remarkable and original in Marr’s work after his exposure to Soutine. Under his gaze, nature’s animating energies are released. The spirit he discovers becomes a metamorphic multiplicity, demanding we repeatedly question the assumptions with which we approach the work and the sources and influences that shape it. Thus, Marr’s subject becomes autonomous, liberated from the analytic authority Bomberg used to control his motif. Wild, Dionysian, abandon is characteristic to both artists, but the centrifugal energy released in Marr’s landscapes and still lifes of the mid-sixties demands a more expansive frame of reference than that of Bomberg and the Borough philosophy, or of Soutine only.