Following Bomberg’s death in 1957, his widow Lilian Holt invited Leslie Marr to Spain to photograph places where Bomberg had lived and worked. This charcoal of Toledo, completed during this emotional trip, pays homage to Bomberg’s contribution to British landscape painting. Bomberg’s painting of the Spanish city in 1929 marked an important turning point in his career. Leaving behind the calm, tightly-controlled handling of paint in his Jerusalem rooftop scenes, at Toledo, Bomberg’s brushwork loosened significantly. In the present work, Marr cites this gestural liberty Bomberg had discovered thirty years previously. Long strikes of charcoal on a large sheet – over half a metre across – stand as acts of remembrance of how Bomberg passed on his expertise in his vigorous, monastic classes at the Borough Polytechnic. Of all Bomberg’s Toledo works, Marr’s charcoal is closest to 'Cathedral, Toledo: Evening' (1929). In both, the cathedral tower anchors the composition, reaching with surging optimism to the very top of the support. In this aspect it is also closely aligned to Bomberg’s charcoal of St Paul’s rising miraculously out of the Blitz (Evening in the City of London, 1944, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). But in Marr’s drawing, a sense of mourning is more pervasive. No hopeful bright streets sweep upwards as they do in Bomberg’s war work, and no commanding vantage point is taken as Bomberg did in 1929. Marr makes the sky glower. Absolute darkness overtakes the lower right corner, and the splayed limbs of the Toledo architecture crowd upwards to overwhelm the viewer who sinks into the invasive mass. If this shows Marr’s interpretation of the ‘spirit in the mass’ it is a subjective, melancholic manifestation, modulated not by imitation – nor even his master’s direct instruction – but by his mature remembrance of that teaching and his own personal emotion. By this time, Marr was also aware of Bomberg’s other students’ increasingly well-received work. Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff had both begun to exhibit at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery. In particular, Auerbach’s depictions of London’s post-Blitz building sites demonstrated new ways of developing Bomberg’s massed, angular architecture through a distilled form in order to reveal an underlying natural structure. More recently, Paul Moorhouse has described how such work by Auerbach ‘is experienced as a tangible object in its own right, defined by its own internal geometry, balance and formal rhythms. The observed world that was its source has been reinvented and re-stated as a new, visual fact’. The same can be said of Marr at Toledo, and although he would reject Auerbach’s distinctive handling of paint – thickness used ‘for its own sake’ – his complication and extension of Bomberg’s search for the ‘the spirit in the mass’ deserves to be considered in tandem with his widely-acclaimed contemporaries.