Made on the same trip to North Wales as Welsh Forest [cat. 17], Landscape near Beddgelert takes an elevated view over the rugged terrain of Snowdonia. It recalls Marr’s trip to Cyprus with Bomberg the preceding summer. Writing forty years later, Marr remembered how, in the mountainous north of the island, he and Bomberg had climbed a steep hill to at last reach a magnificent view, where ‘David immediately said “I could work from here.”’ A lofty perspective allowed the artists to see the landscape more holistically, promoting a schematic simplification of the scene’s structure and a growing proximity to a fundamental nature or energy held within its formal arrangement. Bomberg and Marr had used canvas as a support in Cyprus, involving an extensive process of priming, stretching, and storing the bulky pictures for transport. In Wales, Marr and Peter Richmond, a founding member of the Borough Group, appear to have broken away from their teacher’s example, and favoured more convenient board as a support. Paradoxically, the board’s portability helped Marr and Richmond to reach the locations that so inspired their master’s approach to landscape. In Landscape near Beddgelert, Marr works to communicate the emotional accretions he felt in Wales, of ancient history ‘full of mystery and promise, sometimes dangerous with sudden precipices’. Taking inspiration from Bomberg’s violent scraping of St Hilarion the year before, Marr has repeatedly struck the work. The heightened emotional state in which this took place, in Marr’s own terminology, constitutes a direct communication of the emotions he drew from the site – a clearing of his mental space so that ‘something real can take place’. This process, Marr has insisted, is only possible through his complete submission to the subject and the interpenetration of artist and landscape, forming a zen-like meditative state. The philosophical justification for this stance would come much later, but in Landscape near Beddgelert the emotional potency and experimental technical qualities suggests this approach to landscape was already developing.