ISAAC ROSENBERG (1890-1918)
A WOMAN OF THE CAPE (1914)
Oil on board
38 x 29 cm
PROVENANCEThe Artist, and thence by descent to the previous owner,
Private Collection, Canada
EXHIBITED
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Isaac Rosenberg, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, 22 June - 17 July 1937, no. 20, p. 5
Leeds, University of Leeds, Isaac Rosenberg, May - June 1959, no. 22, p. 32
LITERATURE
I. Parsons, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, London (1984), pl. 11 (a) [ill.]
The present work was painted during Rosenberg's stay with his sister in South Africa as he was recuperating from chronic bronchitis. Another portrait from this time, titled 'The African Girl', was sold at Christie's, London, 20.11.2018, lot 188.
Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol into a Lithuanian family of Jews who had been forced to flee persecution under the Tsars, but was raised in the slums of Whitechapel in a largely Jewish community. His family were highly-educated, and their financial situation did not prevent Isaac and his brothers from study: he attended Street School in Stepney, and took additional drawing lessons at the Arts and Crafts School in Stepney Green.
Rosenberg displayed an early talent for both drawing and writing; however, there was no money to send him to an art school for further development, and he became an apprentice to a firm of Fleet Street engravers. Whatever he learned during this apprenticeship, he regarded it as a waste of time and a stifling occupation, writing '...it is horrible to think of all these hours, when my days are full of vigour and my hands and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling machine.'
Despite the obstacles to his progression, Rosenberg participated in the free evening art classes at Birkbeck College, London, where he won several prizes, and he befriended Mark Gertler and David Bomberg during this time, socialising at the newly-established Whitechapel Art Gallery. During this period he painted portraits of his fellow artist Clare Winsten and Sonia Cohen (the latter went on to marry Rosenberg's friend John Rodker, the publisher).
Rosenberg, like so many artists both professional and amateur, would occasionally visit the National Gallery during the prescribed hours to paint copies of the masterpieces on display there. Whilst painting a copy of Velzquez's Philip IV of Spain, three Jewish women stopped to admire his work: following a conversation, they agreed to sponsor Rosenberg's studies at the Slade (at the cost of £21 a year, it had remained out of his reach). He immediately enrolled, joining his friends Gertler and Bomberg (who had also received sponsorship separately), thus becoming part of the famous 'Crisis of Brilliance' generation.
Partly because his circumstances precluded paying models their fees, his body of work includes many self-portraits, as well as landscapes and works on literary themes. In 1914, his work was included in the 'Jewish Section' co-curated by Bomberg and Jacob Epstein as part of 'Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements' at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Rosenberg was a gifted artist, whose considerable skill was evident already and who could stand confidently alongside Bomberg and Gertler; however, he was as much a poet as he was a painter, as his epitaph ('Artist and Poet') movingly attests to.
Self-funded collections of his poems were published in 1912 and 1915, and support was forthcoming from well-connected advocates such as Edward Marsh - Churchill's private secretary and an important patron of the arts - and the poet Laurence Binyon. Nevertheless, Rosenberg was always something of an outsider, never quite finding critical success. Ezra Pound himself even recommended Rosenberg to the editor of Poetry, though his snobbery towards the young writer was blunt: 'I think you may as well give this poor devil a show […] He has something in him, horribly rough but then 'Stepney, East…'
This sort of acutely British snobbery was no doubt the main element that prevented Rosenberg from achieving much notice in literary circles in his own lifetime, something he was all too aware of. 'You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had...', he wrote in a letter. 'Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.'
After the 1914 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, Rosenberg visited his sister in South Africa, where he painted, wrote and lectured about art, before returning to England in 1915. Enlisting in the army in October 1915, he was sent to the front lines early the following year. He was a private, assigned to a unit where he was the only Jew, and endured considerable abuse at the hands of his 'fellow' soldiers. Like so many before and after him, such abuse led to a profound self-consideration of his identity, which found a powerful outlet in his poetry.
Few pictures from this time remain, though his Self-portrait in Steel Helmet (1916, now in the Ben Uri collection) is a deeply poignant exception to this. He was killed, aged 27, while on a night patrol near Arras on the 1st April 1918. Despite publishing only two short collections of poetry during his lifetime, Rosenberg is now regarded as one of the most important War Poets of his generation. He is all the more important as - by contrast to Owen, Sassoon, Graves or Brooke for example - he was one of the few poets from the rank and file of the British army in the Great War. The hardships endured are writ-large on the manuscripts of his war poetry, which are stained with mud from the trenches and marred by water damage: in June 1916 he reported that 'I've been wet through for four days and nights.' He went on, 'the army is the most detestable invention on this earth and nobody but a private in the army knows what it is to be a slave.' Siegfried Sassoon was acutely aware of this when he wrote, in a foreword to Rosenberg's poems, 'Sensuous front-line existence is there, hateful and repellent, unforgettable and inescapable.'