This caused a rift with his father, an Admiralty engineer, and was thought by his intimates to account, at least in part, for the palpable emotional depth and passion of his paintings.
According to the artist, he worked on the painting non-stop for three days, during which time he experienced a quasi-mystical experience when he seemed to travel through the sun; as he emerged, he heard a voice saying, "Now you are connected.
"[2] At various times he taught art at Portsmouth Polytechnic and Morley College in London, where his students included Tatiana Litvinov, daughter of Joseph Stalin's one-time Foreign Minister.
When unveiled in 1999 it would be described by another former Bomberg pupil, Frank Auerbach, as 'a brave and ambitious enterprise;' the art historian Richard Cork would call it a 'millennial tour de force'.
A month before his death he published a letter in The Guardian very critical of a materialistic ethos in contemporary western art, provoked by the auction at Sotheby's of work by Damien Hirst.