Isaac Rosenberg was born into a Jewish family in Bristol, England in 1890 and brought up in great poverty in London's Whitechapel. He divided his creativity between poetry and art, taking evening art classes at Birkbeck College, before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art (1911–14). While beginning to receive critical acclaim as a painter-poet, he enlisted in the First World War in October 1915 for the remuneration. He was killed at the front near Arras in northern France on April Fool's Day, 1918.
Poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg was born into a Jewish family in Bristol, England on 25 November 1890. His parents, who had fled Tsarist oppression in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887 moved to London's East End 'ghetto' in 1897 where Rosenberg attended school in Whitechapel and Stepney. Despite an early talent for drawing and writing, by the age of 14 he had been unhappily apprenticed to a firm of Fleet Street engravers. He devoured poetry by Byron, Keats, Shelley, and, most importantly, William Blake. Rosenberg took evening classes at Birkbeck Art School, where he won many prizes WHAT PRIZES?. After meeting the painter, Lily Delissa Joseph by chance at the National Gallery, she arranged, with two friends NAME THEM, to sponsor his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art (1911–14), where he studied under Fred Brown, Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, alongside fellow 'Whitechapel boys', Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. Rosenberg produced landscapes, portraits, and allegorical scenes, and in 1912 his painting Joy>/em> won a First Class Certificate. In the same year he reviewed a joint exhibition by Jewish artists, J. H. Amschewitz and Henry Ospovat at the Baillie Galleries in the Jewish Chronicle, and sold a sanguine drawing at the New English Art Club WAS HE A MEMBER?.
Often unable to afford models, Rosenberg made numerous self-portraits, particularly between 1912 and 14, ranging from the melancholic Romantic tradition of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s sketches of the young Keats, that he later discarded in favour of a series of leaner, bolder self-portraits which displayed a new bravura confidence and marked his journey into modernism. In 1912 he published his first volume of poems, Night and Day. ANY MORE ON THIS In May 1914 five of his works featured in the Jewish section of the exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements, curated by Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, alongside his peers Mark GertlerBernard Meninsky, Horace Brodzky and, from the older generation, Alfred Wolmark. In June of the same year, recuperating from chronic bronchitis, Rosenberg travelled to South Africa to visit his sister, where he painted, wrote and gave lectures on art which were published in a Cape Town journal. He returned to England in 1915, and published a second collection of poems entitled Youth.
Despite his Pacifist beliefs, Rosenberg enlisted in the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment (KORL) in October 1915 (so that his mother would get his soldier's allowance) and, although inadequate in physique and general health, he was sent to the Front in northern France in 1916. Prior to serving in the trenches, he continued to draw, creating a final Self-Portrait In Steel Helmet (1916, Ben Uri Collection), also his last finished work as a painter. Drawn in gouache and chalk on poor quality brown paper, possibly salvaged from a parcel sent from home, it was similar to a sketch made in a letter, entitled Self-portrait Sketch in Tin Helmet (c.1916, Imperial War Museum) of which Rosenberg joked to his family that it was ‘The New Fashion boiler hat – the trench hat’. From 1916 onwards he continued to write poetry.
Isaac Rosenberg was killed aged 27 while patrolling near Arras, France on 1 April 1918. His body was not immediately found, but in 1926 the remains of 11 soldiers of the KORL were discovered and buried together in Northumberland Cemetery, Fampoux; his remains were later moved to Bailleul Road East Cemetery, St. Laurent-Blangy, near Arras. Rosenberg’s work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Tate and National Portrait Gallery. Posthumous exhibitions were held at the Brotherton Gallery, Leeds (1959) and the National Book League, London (1975). The exhibition, Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle (Ben Uri Gallery, 2008) was the first exhibition to contextualise his art with that of his Whitechapel peers.
Isaac Rosenberg in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Isaac Rosenberg]
Publications related to [Isaac Rosenberg] in the Ben Uri Library