Clare Winsten (née Clara Birnberg) was born to Galician Jewish parents in Romania in 1892 and immigrated to England with her family, settling in London's East End, circa 1902. Studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, she became the only girl among the so-called 'Whitechapel Boys', her work included in the ‘Jewish Section’, co-curated by David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein, within the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s ‘Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements’ in 1914. A lifelong pacifist, she sculpted, painted and exhibited throughout her life and was an active member of the Women’s Freedom League.
Artist Clare Winsten (née Clara Birnberg) was born to Galician Jewish parents in Romania on 10 August 1892. Fleeing pogroms, the family travelled through Germany before settling in London’s East End Jewish ghetto around 1902. Sensitive to her origins, she referred to herself as a ‘downstart’ (Tickner). She was educated at Rutland Street Council School and the Central Foundation Girls School in Tower Hamlets (1905–10), where her report noted that she spoke Romanian and Yiddish, was ‘artistic, disorderly’, talkative, and possessed an ‘artistic temperament’ (MacDougall). In 1910, aged 18, she won a scholarship to the Royal Female School of Art (later Central School of Art and Design, now Central Saint Martins), afterwards transferring to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she studied drawing under Henry Tonks (1910-12), claiming that his negative comments made her ‘miserable’ (Richard Cork, David Bomberg, 1987), and painting under Philip Wilson Steer, while feeling alienated from both the male and the middle and upper-class women students.
Winsten cropped her hair and became a member of the Women’s Freedom League. She was the only girl among the so-called 'Whitechapel Boys' group of Anglo-Jewish artists and poets associated with the East End, which included her future husband Samuel ‘Simy’ Weinstein (later Stephen Winsten), and Joseph Leftwich (who coined the group's name), as well as Slade contemporaries, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and painter-poet Isaac Rosenberg. Her Slade compositions included the large unfinished watercolour, Attack (1910, Ben Uri Collection), partly inspired by Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Bomberg featured her work in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’ he co-curated with Jacob Epstein as part of the groundbreaking exhibition Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914, although she also exhibited within the main exhibition, alongside female Vorticists, Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr. Bomberg painted Winsten and for a time they worked along similar lines, but their relationship ended badly. She was also close to Isaac Rosenberg and they created reciprocal portraits (Winsten's of Rosenberg in 1913 (British Museum) and his of her, two years later in 1915, (UCL Art Collections)). Her drawings ‘share a rhythmic simplification with the generation of Gaudier-Brzeska, and a heritage from Brancusi, Picasso of around 1908, and Matisse of the "Dance”' (MacDougall, p. 105).
The Winstens were lifelong Pacifists and during the First World War were Conscientious Objectors and members of the No-Conscription Fellowship. In November 1916 Stephen Winsten was imprisoned (the first of three consecutive terms) for his beliefs, and the couple’s first child, Theodora, was born in 1917, followed by Ruth (1920) and Christopher (1923). In 1920 Stephen published a book of poems, Chains, for which Clare produced several (unpublished) illustrations (some extant as offsets), based on his experiences. In the same year two of her drawings were included in the 'little' magazine Voices: in Poetry and Prose (Volume 3 March 1920). She exhibited irregularly in group exhibitions, including the Goupil winter salon in 1931. In the same year, during his time in London, she was given 'unrestricted access' to paint Mahatma Gandhi’s portrait. According to Ernst Gombrich, Gandhi was so pleased with the result 'that he took hold of her brush and signed his name in oil colour' (MacDougall, p. 114). Her other sitters included film director, Gabriel Pascal, poets Robert Graves and W H Auden, and composer Benjamin Britten; she also painted landscapes. In 1937 a book entitled Modern English Art by her son, Christopher Blake, included three portraits by Winsten alongside works by her contemporaries, Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Ben Nicholson, and Alfred Wolmark, among others.
As humanists, pacifists and vegetarians, the Winstens were natural allies of the polemicist and playwright George Bernard Shaw (whose biographer Stephen became), who was their neighbour in the village of Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire in the late 1940s. He sat for at least three portraits by Winsten and a bust (cast in an edition of three). Winsten also sculpted a bronze figure of St Joan for Shaw’s Corner, apparently at his request, and in 1949 ‘collaborated’ with him to produce pictures for his play, Buoyant Billions: a comedy of no manners in prose by Bernard Shaw and in pictures by Clare Winsten. She also modelled a bronze memorial to the pacifist and social work pioneer Jayne Addams (Mother and Child, 1968) for Toynbee Hall in London's East End. Clare Winsten died in London, England in 1989. A retrospective was held at the Strang Print Room, UCL in 1994. Her work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and UCL Art Collections. Her work has also featured posthumously in several Ben Uri exhibitions, including Liberators: Extraordinary women artists from the Ben Uri Collection (2018); Out of Chaos: Ben Uri: 100 Years in London, Somerset House (2015) and Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg & His Circle (2008).
Clare Winsten in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Clare Winsten]
Publications related to [Clare Winsten] in the Ben Uri Library