David Bomberg, 
British 1890-1957 - 

Farm Field, Talgwyn, Red Wharf Bay, 1944; 

oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right 'Bomberg 44' and bears inscription with title on the reverse of the stretcher, 58.5 x 76 cm (ARR) 

Provenance: 
private collection, London, purchased in 1983 

Note: 
the owner of the work was a close friend and client of Agi Katz, founder and director of Boundary Gallery, who specialised in the work of David Bomberg and other Jewish and émigré artists in Britain; Rosebery's were responsible for selling her Estate in 2022. The work is listed in an inventory made by Agi Katz of the owner's collection. 

Made towards the end of the Second World War, Bomberg visited Angelsea with his family in 1944, making a number of works of Talgwyn Farm as a respite from the more urban works he had been making. Richard Cork has described these as showing his 'impulsive emtional reaction to the landscape'. This followed an important commission for the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1942 to paint an underground bomb store at RAF Fauld in Tutbury, creating a small body of works that were highly abstracted and almost geometric in form. Bomberg would make more trips across the UK in 1946, making a series of similarly expansive landscapes of Cornwall, Devon and Scotland. These landscapes present a renewed engagement with nature itself and a large number of these are now in public collections including 'Evening, Cornwall, 1947' (Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry), 'Bideford, Devon, 1946' (Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter) and a related Welsh landscape, 'Talgwyn Farm, Red Wharf Bay, Anglesea, 1944' (The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth). 

David Bomberg was a member of the Whitechapel Boys. He studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and alongside artists such as Stanley Spencer, Ben Nicholson, and Paul Nash. He was awarded the Slade Prize for drawing in 1913, after which he travelled to France, meeting contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. In 1914 he co-curated an exhibition with Jacob Epstein, in which his works were shown alongside those of Modigliano, Kisling, and other prominent Jewish artists living in France. 

His first solo exhibition was held at the Chenil Gallery in 1914, where visitors included Augustus John, Marinetti, Duchamp and Brancusi. Bombergs work has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, including at the Israel Museum in 1983, at the Tate in 1988, and at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1979 when under the directorship of Nicholas Serota. His works are currently held at MoMA in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Tate in London and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.