On their trip to Cyprus during the summer of 1948, Marr, Dinora, and the Bomberg family camped near the mountain of St Hilarion on the northern coast of the island for two weeks. They had experienced difficulty finding suitable areas to paint, incurring issues with transportation (involving temperamental donkeys) and accommodation, but St. Hilarion proved a productive site for both Marr and Bomberg. Marr recalled that Bomberg produced around nine cavasses there – over half his total works from the trip. Marr himself was less prolific, but on daily excursions to paint the area together, the artists produced an impressive body of work capturing the various angles of the vertiginous crags and the crumbling masonry of the tenth-century castle at the mountain’s uppermost crest. Despite the fact that Marr was still Bomberg’s student, his rendering of the mountain benefits from a comparison to what Bomberg produced at his side. It rejects the explosive energy that his teacher mustered. Instead, a carefully constructed balance is measured between flashes of ochre highlighting the mountain’s peaks and its pale, scumbled centre where the energy of the surrounding mass turns in upon itself. Marr’s brushwork is shorter and more tightly knotted than Bomberg’s, expressing his hard-won successes in relating his nascent sensibility to the complex formal arrangement of the mountain before him. Where Bomberg’s harsh tectonics clash in the burnt light of the setting sun, Marr’s forms are softened by twilight. They slip together and gently interfuse creating a mood of surging organic formation. On the one hand violence is displayed in a state of eruption, on the other violence is witnessed pent-up, moments before its release. This contrast between the two artists’ approaches was physically inscribed upon St Hilarion when, as Marr remembers, Bomberg approached the painting to assess its progress. Using his finger nails, he suddenly scored long striations onto the paint surface around the peak of the mountain before declaring it complete.