David Bomberg was born in Birmingham in 1890 to impoverished Polish-Jewish parents. In 1895, Bomberg’s father, an immigrant leatherworker, moved the family to London’s East End. Bomberg would spend the rest of his childhood here, later becoming a prominent figure among the Whitechapel Boys.

Despite showing talent as a draughtsman, Bomberg’s family couldn’t afford art school so, in 1906, he was apprenticed to a North London lithographer. In 1908, Bomberg began attending evening classes at the Westminster School of Art where he was taught by Sir Walter Sickert until 1910. With financial support from the Jewish Education Aid Society and John Singer Sargent, Bomberg then entered the Slade School of Art in 1911. Here, he flourished alongside artists including Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, C. R. W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington in the school’s second and last ‘crisis of brilliance’.

After leaving the Slade in 1913, Bomberg met Picasso and Modigliani on a trip to Paris and his work became heavily influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. World War I, however, significantly altered artistic outlooks in Britain; with new, retrogressive attitudes towards modernism, Bomberg began to reassess his relationship with the modern, machine age, and abstract and futuristic styles.

In 1923, after a period marked by struggle and poverty, Bomberg relocated to Palestine with his wife, Alice. On the recommendation of his contemporary, Muirhead Bone, Bomberg had accepted a commission from a British Zionist organisation; he was to promote their cause by painting the pioneers heroically constructing the Zionist settlements. Bomberg, however, eschewed this overtly political brief, instead, favouring naturalistic landscapes that harked back to the historical and spiritual significance of Jerusalem, rejecting the human and mechanic re-landscaping of the land.

In this drawing (c.1923), Bomberg depicts a scene of agrarian labour; a man drives an ox whilst three, faceless men with scythes toil behind him. The figurative depiction and topographical focus highlight a distinct divergence in style from Bomberg’s pre-war work, however, vestiges of his cubist mode linger in the bold, geometric delineation of the landscape. At once capturing these antithetical styles, this drawing unites Bomberg’s distinctive artistic periods at the turning point of his career.

Bomberg remained in Palestine until 1927, painting Jerusalem and the surrounding landscape. Over the course of his time there, Bomberg would almost entirely reject his cubist mode and figural subject matter as a newfound obsession with topography and architecture burgeoned.