Raymond Kanelba was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1897. A largely self-taught artist, he moved to London in 1939 to complete a portrait commission for Count Edward Raczynski. Living in London for almost a decade thereafter, Kanelba is known for his portraits of the English upper classes and his portrait of HRH Queen Elizabeth II, exhibited in 1956.
Painter and portraitist, Raymond Kanelba was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) on 12 February 1897. He enrolled at Vienna’s Academie der Bildenden Kunste in 1919, but left after a few months without obtaining his diploma. In 1924 he married Maria Wohl, daughter of a wealthy Polish industrialist and together they moved to Paris where Kanelba now had the financial means to fund his artistic practice. In the French capital, as part of the École de Paris group of artists, Kanelba was taken up by Modigliani and Chagall’s dealer Leopold Zborowski and subsequently attracted critical attention; his ‘vision’ was described in 1928 as ‘delicate as it is subtle’, and ‘his eye’ as ‘extraordinarily sensitive to all kinds of modulations of colour and all the variations of atmosphere’ (Sotheby’s, 2021). Their son, George, was born in 1925. Following 14 years in Paris, and a short period successfully establishing his reputation in New York in 1938, Kanelba sailed to London in 1939 to paint the portrait of the Polish Ambassador to the Court of St James, Count Edward Raczynski. The same year, he featured in a series entitled ‘Portrait-Painters of To-Day’ in the September issue of Vogue, designed to acquaint its readers with the work of ‘outstanding foreign portrait-painters in London, Paris, and New York’ (Crowninshield, 1939).
While spending the years of the Second World War serving in the Home Guard, the success of his prestigious Raczynski commission opened many doors in London for Kanelba. In 1940 he exhibited a portrait of Lord David, the son of the Earl and Countess of Brecknock at the O’Toole Gallery in Canada. He also painted portraits of children which were especially popular among the English upper classes. His young sitters included the grandchildren of Lady Violet Astor, the two daughters of Lord Louis Mountbatten and the daughter of the writer Alec Waugh (Evelyn's elder brother). In 1941 a portrait of his own son was included in the Royal Academy Exhibition, described as ‘a small canvas of a child's head, which combined something of the graceful dignity of a Chardin with the stylised wistfulness of Marie Laurencin' (Benson and Askwith, 1941). In 1942 Kanelba participated in the Allied Artists’ Exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists, London, prompting the description of his paintings in The Studio: ‘Another polish portraitist, Kanelba, who works equally well in oil and gouache, shows a popular half-nude painted with low tone and restricted palette. All of his work seems to be centered around the same model, which is a pity’ (Longdein, 1942). In the same year he held a solo show of nudes at the prestigious Leger Galleries.
Kanelba was naturalised in 1947, the same year he permanently relocated to New York. Having previously kept several mistresses, it was there that Kanelba began his longest affair with the Holocaust survivor and author Lisa Hoffman. Suspicious that Hoffman was seeing another man, he sliced off the bottom section of his nude portrait of her in a fit of jealousy. Holding many successful solo exhibitions in New York, Kanelba also continued to maintain his reputation in England. In 1951, as part of an exhibition at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, his portrait of Mr and Mrs Frank Gielgud was described by Stephen Bone, art critic of The Manchester Guardian as ‘One of the most attractive and interesting pictures [...] painted in soft blond tones which are much more effective than much strident colour nearby’ (Bone, 1951). In the winter of 1955 he returned to London to complete the most significant commission of his career, a portrait of the newly crowned HRH Queen Elizabeth II, painted from a series of six sittings at Buckingham Palace. Exhibited at an exhibition to mark the tercentenary of the Grenadier Guards at St. James’s Palace in 1956, Kanelba’s painting, showing the Queen dressed in the uniform of Colonel-in-Chief, took ‘pride of place’ (Military Reporter, The Times, 1956). Reproductions appeared on the cover of many British and Australian magazines, and while the commission was unpaid, it achieved for Kanelba great visibility and international prestige. It was because of this portrait that the Jewish Chronicle, for instance, put him beside Yankel Adler and Josef Herman as one among many Polish-Jewish artists who were 'household names' in Britain (Cang, 1956).
Known for the ‘anti-impressionist’ French inspiration of his paintings that tried ‘valiantly to remain figurative and abstract at the same time’, Kanelba once announced that ‘to deprive art of its emotional content is to impoverish it’ (E. C. M., 1954). Raymond Kanelba died suddenly in London, England on 23 July 1960 while visiting, in the midst of a flourishing career, and after becoming a citizen of the USA in 1957. His works are held by various private collections in the UK and internationally.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Raymond Kanelba]
Publications related to [Raymond Kanelba] in the Ben Uri Library