Signed l.r.: Bomberg/19

Pen and black ink with brown wash, 26.5 by 20.5 cm (10 ½ by 8 ins)

Towards the end of the First World War, Bomberg was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials committee to paint a tribute to a Canadian company of sappers from the Royal Engineers who died tunnelling under St Eloi on the Western Front in 1916. An initial more futurist version of the event was rejected, but the final painting (a study of which is in the Imperial War Museum (acc. ART 2078)) is full of the energy and geometric form that characterises the best of his futurist and vorticist-inspired work of the 1910s. The present work is a strong example of one of the artist’s studies for this commission.