Though David Bomberg’s technical abilities and physical health never failed in his final years, he struggled with depression and a loss of ambition throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. Nevertheless, the standard of the work he did produce was unwavering and he enjoyed periodic bursts of creativity. This drawing, Ronda El Barrio, San Francisco, was made when he was living in southern Spain during one of his last productive periods. Bomberg and his wife Lilian (née Holt), an artist in her own right, had an affinity for Andalucía and they visited the region on painting trips before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1935. After Bomberg’s teaching position at the Borough Polytechnic was rescinded in 1953, he rediscovered painting and drawing, gaining inspiration and renewing his confidence with several portraits depicting his step-daughter, Dinora Marr. Shortly afterwards, Bomberg and his wife moved to Ronda in Spain and they lived there for the final three years of Bomberg’s life between February 1954 and 1957. During this time, the Bombergs often used donkeys to carry their equipment on painting and drawing expeditions around the town and into the barren landscape around Ronda. Ronda El Barrio, San Francisco was made on one such trip, though it is unclear if the work was executed at a short distance from the town or from a vantage point within the town itself. The drawing depicts the sun-washed slopes and the eponymous hilltop town of Ronda. (‘El Barrio’ refers to the town’s general neighbourhood away from the centre.) The particular area depicted is a quarter called San Francisco which lies to the south of the main conurbation. Rooftops and walls on the right-hand side of the drawing come to an abrupt end, and Bomberg’s draughtsmanship dramatises the sudden precipice where the rocky elevation drops away. The quality of Bomberg’s late Spanish drawings has been summarised by the scholar Richard Cork. Using his fingers as much as the charcoal stick, Bomberg achieves a richness of texture which depends very heavily on his ability to juxtapose dramatic extremes of light and shadow. Areas where the paper has been left free to register refulgent whiteness give way to passages of almost velvet blackness […]. The dramatic rendition of light and atmosphere in Ronda El Barrio, San Francisco is accompanied by an impressive variety of graphic marks. The contours of the landscape and the roofline of buildings are detailed by firm applications of the charcoal, resulting in deep black lines. In the foreground, vegetation is given texture with negative marks, the charcoal put down and immediately smudged and scratched away with a finger. Several long, lightly applied lines sail through the overcast sky above, partly concealed by an evenly smudged haze of charcoal.