Two restless and frustrating years followed Bomberg’s return from Jerusalem. Having faced critical neglect and the breakdown of his marriage, in 1929 he left England once again and set his sights on the Spanish city of Toledo. ‘I saw a bit of landscape in an El Greco’, Bomberg told Peter Richmond later in life, ‘and that persuaded me to visit Toledo’.14 Though the Spanish master’s work had previously informed Bomberg’s figurative painting, this fresh application of El Greco’s influence to landscape was a relatively new result of the Palestine years. The choice to visit Toledo, and the work completed there, evidences Bomberg’s dedication to topography-based work. Cathedral, Toledo: Evening is one of the most impressive of a cluster of oils made shortly after Bomberg’s arrival in the city. Working from his ‘little bit [sic] of a platform roof’ he recorded his responses to the cathedral stretching up to the top of his canvas at afternoon, evening, and sunset. The present work demonstrates the artist’s newfound confidence in utilising the liquidity of his oil paint, dragging long meandering blends of pigment together to form the pulsating edges of the foreground roofs. Bold darts of royal blue prick the picture surface, putting expressive proof to one critic’s prophesy made the year before that ‘Bomberg is primarily a colourist, and...he has the makings of a very fine colourist indeed’.16 Some of the most intricately worked passages of paint in Cathedral, Toledo: Evening are the thick licks of white and gold paint suggesting the ethereal light and cloud that envelop the cathedral tower. With this romantic perceptivity to weather and light, Bomberg’s painting finds association with Marr’s later landscapes absorbed by the elemental tumult of southern New Zealand [cat. 20.] Although in Cathedral, Toledo: Evening, we see a loosening of Bomberg’s paint, the formal acuity of his penetrating gaze remains constant. Looking back at the development of these years he recalled ‘I had found I could more securely develop on the lines of Cézanne’s rediscovery that the world was round and there was a way out through the sunlight – this I have followed and matured in ever since’. Cathedral, Toledo: Evening, born from his initial experience of Mediterranean light and heat in Jerusalem, documents Bomberg’s realisation of his mature style. In a demonstration of a new ‘way out through the sunlight’ he discovered in Spain, it stands as an early example of the masterful balance of expressive liberty and formal control that would define his best work throughout the remainder of his career.