This remarkable painting was one of the first Marr completed. He had taken to painting in Egypt a year earlier while posted at a radar station outside Alexandria. Finding it an enjoyable way to ease the boredom of serving in an exceptionally quiet area while fighting raged elsewhere, he had continued to paint in Palestine while stationed between Beirut and Haifa. In the Tent, Egypt was completed upon his return to Egypt having been ordered to pack up his station and equipment, report to a transit camp in Heliopolis near Cairo, and ultimately return to England. The work was completed in makeshift conditions: its support is canvas roughly cut from airmen’s kit bags and glued onto board. More glue was diluted and applied to prime the canvas, while Marr used the same crude brushes he had sourced locally the preceding year. Cataloguing the assorted objects arranged on his camp table, there is a rigidity and diligence to Marr’s composition that make his concentration on this still unfamiliar activity – painting – quite palpable. However, he already jettisons superfluous detail by presenting the various bottles and pots as simplified, discrete units. An interest in colour relations is also evident in dashes of bright yellow balanced against mellow russet and greys. So treated, his few essential belongings take on new significance in the dimly lit tent. Marr had quickly understood light’s role on modelling his forms and they press out of the picture surface, hovering in front of the greatcoats hanging behind, even emanating what Heidegger would call zuhandenheit. The cigarettes, shaving brush, glowing hurricane lamp, and a copy of a monograph on Augustus John Marr had bought in Haifa, populate the fabric of his immediate reality. This early work displays the artist’s ability to communicate his heightened sensitivity and communion with his subject at the moment of composition.