The River Barle runs north across the border of Devon and Somerset, a few miles west of Marr’s home at Higher Chuggaton between 1963 and 1970. Due to heavy rains the area receives during winter months, Marr likely caught the river in spate, raging against its banks and the adjacent woodland. As in his Welsh Forest [cat. 17], the artist submits the entire picture surface to his subject: the symbiotic motions of each individual brushstroke combine in a riot of vitalism to eliminate any horizon line, as vegetation and elemental forces encroach evenly on every side of the square image. Like Welsh Forest, lighter tones anchor the composition centrally. Made in the same winter as Still Life with Flowers [cat. 24], The Barle in Winter continues Marr’s practical comprehension of Soutine’s work, which he had seen a few months earlier. Here, Marr already shows a remarkable ability to maintain the structure of his image while charging it with seething masses at war with one another. Though this might be attributed to his predecessor’s work in the hills around Céret, the ease and speed with which Marr blends this wild rhythm into his personal vernacular suggests it was latent if not innate – stimulated by the river itself. The notion of Soutine acting as a structuring influence to shape Marr’s work would also have been nonsensical to both artists, and indeed to David Sylvester who described Soutine as ‘the Dionysian [rather than Apollonian] type of artist, “inspirational” in approach (and often going through weeks and months of inactivity waiting for “inspiration”), in gesture vehement to the point of frenzy’. Sylvester’s distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian manifestations of creativity, representing opposing forces of frenetic abandon and measured restraint, is particularly pertinent when translated to Marr, who had been introduced to the concept through Bomberg who was been greatly influenced by T.E. Hulme and A.R. Orage’s writing on the topic before and during the First World War. In 1963, Sylvester’s words would have had fresh impact on Marr, encouraging the Dionysian frenzy The Barle in Winter displays. The balance of power between wild Dionysian and controlled Apollonian tendencies, may also have called to Marr’s mind one of Bomberg’s shortcomings. In a review of a London Group show in 1955, The Times lamented how Bomberg ‘might have been our English Soutine if the passion of his handling did not so often override the subject’. If Marr agreed with this critique, his careful management of energy and structure in The Barle in Winter sees him attempt to redress the balance Bomberg mismanaged. Ingeniously, the structure Marr employs, as in Welsh Forest, is that of nature itself – the surface of Marr’s oil paint mimics the experience of watching eddies and currents of a stream or the uproarious lashing of a woodland in a gale.