The outbreak of civil war in Spain in 1936 was a particularly shocking reality for Bomberg and his family, who fled back to England as the conflict escalated. The artist’s time spent in Spain had formed one of the most productive and progressive periods in his career. Visits to Cuenca, Ronda, and the Asturias, yielded the confidence Bomberg desperately needed to sustain his creative morale and unleash his most expressive engagement with landscape. Yet despite once being described as ‘British in his blood and all his movements’, the return to the country of his birth interrupted the creative energy and certitude Bomberg had built up over the preceding years. Moonlight, Beddgelert illustrates the stubborn continuity of this earlier brilliance. Although he had hoped to discover inspiration in dramatic landscapes abroad, financial constraints left North Wales as the most affordable destination for Bomberg to find the mountainous terrain he loved. The work sees him return to the technique of painting by moonlight seen earlier in Jerusalem [cat. 3] and later in Cyprus with Marr [cat. 15]. The mountain heaves, an inscrutable, schematised mass of shadow. The moonlight cascades over its upper ridge to illuminate the bowl of a corrie below. Yet it is not the moon itself nor the mountain that is Bomberg’s focus, but rather their interaction. The furious scrubbing together of different hues – a technique developed in Toledo – gives life to the hillside, articulating the glowing mists that shift across it. A spirited, near horizontal sweep of citric yellow and white forms the central feature of the composition. There is a tendency to categorise Bomberg as a painter who shunned the British landscape, and he undoubtedly preferred working abroad. However, his British work made throughout his career demonstrates his remarkably consistent expressive ability and formal insight. Whether handling the British hills associated with Richard Wilson and contemporaries like John Piper, or the severe Mediterranean mountains that were his element, the impact of Bomberg’s work remains substantial and endlessly varied. Sylvester wrote that works such as Moonlight, Beddgelert, ‘are paintings filled with awe before the massiveness and mystery and menace of nature’, not vague or generalised but ‘Wordsworthian in their aptness to what is there’. As an instance of the emotional specificity and sincerity observed by Sylvester, Moonlight, Beddgelert illustrates the continuity of Bomberg’s seemingly separate periods of inspiration. His experience as a man and a painter in Spain was not lost, but was carried forward through a romantic sensibility and developed on home soil. Consequently, Moonlight, Beddgelert makes an important claim for the artist’s place amongst the greatest British painters of the twentieth century.