As well as visiting Wales, in the summer of 1936 Bomberg held an exhibition at the Cooling Galleries in London. It showed a full survey of his Spanish work: challenging, essentialised, dizzying, awe-inspiring responses to the sublimity of the Picos de Europa and the savage beauty of Ronda. But with sales and critical appraisal still unforthcoming, according to the artist’s own pessimistic assessment, the exhibition was ‘a flop’. Alternative sources of income and validation also proved elusive: Kenneth Clark, the young new director of the National Gallery, consistently refused to purchase any of Bomberg’s works either for his private or the national collections, while also rejecting proposals for a public patronage programme. The worsening situation in his beloved Spain exacerbated his deteriorating mental state, and by 1937 Bomberg was wracked by depression and creative uncertainty. It was on this emotional declivity that Bomberg took to self-portraiture. In Self-Portrait (Green Theme), the artist’s piercing gaze struggles to penetrate a dark halo of heavy brush strokes. Subject and background merge in a palette of subdued tones that belies their chromatic complexity. Vibrant golds and terracottas glow suppressed through diaphanous sheets of khaki and inky navy. His eyes are abstracted to two deep green lines separated by an angular nose, which catches light incisively in the centre of the canvas. No firm vertical or horizontal features anchor Bomberg’s image of himself. He emerges decentered, tilting as if off balance, threatening to slip out of the frame altogether. The work gives some inclination as to the artist’s fear of unjustifiably slipping out of the narrative of modern art in Britain to poverty and irrelevance. As Cork observed, Bomberg presents himself ‘as phantom-like figure confronting the inevitability of dissolution’. At last, an agonised and faltering curve of red, added late in the painting process, distinguishes an ear from the blank space behind. Holding these features in concert, the work typifies Bomberg’s mastery of expressive colour and stands as a stirring riposte to his doubters. Self-Portrait (Green Theme) is one of a harrowing series of five important self-portraits from the same year now dispersed to public collections (National Portrait Gallery, London; Arts Council of Great Britain; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester), and is the only one remaining in private hands. In their seriality, these works recall Rembrandt’s many self-portraits, and in Green Theme’s particular tilted pose topped by the bare dome of his head, Bomberg associates himself with Cézanne’s Self-Portrait (1880-1) at the National Gallery. The artist may have had such prestigious names and spaces in mind when creating Green Theme but he would not live to see the recognition this series of works would achieve. In a fit of hopelessness, he almost entirely ceased painting from 1938 until 1941. Nonetheless, in Self-Portrait (Green Theme), he creates an extraordinarily resonant image of the sacrifices of seeking a creative truth, and claims his place alongside the masters who inspired him.