This painting was made following a rather frustrating visit Bomberg and his wife made to Snowdonia in the summer of 1936, during which it rained for most of their stay. This oil captures the glorious range of colours seen in the landscape after the rain. Bomberg's application of paint is creamy and the individual marks pronounced - each brushload of paint describes a particular area of the scene, but the paint is not subjugated to the image, instead the viewer is asked simultanously to consider the paint as image and as paint itself. This approach was later to become central to the practice of Bomberg's well-known students Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, whose use of heavy impasto has its roots in the classes they took with him at Borough Polytechnic in the late 1940s.



Before 1936 Bomberg had already painted the mountains of Scotland and Spain, the year before travelling to Ronda for the first time.. These mountain scenes often take a high vantage point and the artist clearly revels in portraying the dramatic interlocking shapes and vertiginous angles. Bomberg's interest in the underlying structure of the landscape can be traced right back to his early Vorticist works.