Born to a Jewish immigrant family on November 25, 1890, Isaac Rosenberg grew up in London’s East End. Though finances were limited, Isaac was accepted to the prestigious Slade School of Fine Arts, where he studied painting and drawing along with contemporaries Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler. Before entering Slade, Rosenberg painted an impressive portrait of himself to present to the Jewish Education Aid Society, an organization which ultimately helped to finance Isaac’s studies.
At Slade, Rosenberg won prizes for his artwork and developed an affinity and talent for poetry. Seeking a more temperate climate for chronic health issues, Rosenberg later headed for Cape Town, South Africa, his plans being to continue writing poetry and perhaps make a living as a portrait painter. World War I arrived with a fury, however, and even though Rosenberg was still not healthy and of pacifistic beliefs, he enlisted in 1915. Rosenberg’s poem “On Receiving News of the War” expressed his fateful perceptions of “God’s blood” being shed, and how “[s]ome spirit old” had “turned with malign kiss/Our lives to mould.”
Break of Day in the Trenches
Slight in stature, Isaac was assigned to the Bantam regiment for shorter soldiers. Described by some as “elf-like” yet moody and melancholy, Rosenberg surely found war to be sheer hell. He wrote powerful verse nonetheless, and he would later be well-remembered for his soldier‘s perspective in “Break of Day in the Trenches” and “Louse Hunting.” Sadly, Rosenberg was killed in April of 1918 by enemy fire in Somme, France, his career as both painter and poet abruptly ended and his corpse initially dumped into a common grave.
With the passing of time, Rosenberg’s poetry has received its due share of praise and his self-portraits are part of the Tate Britain collection and London’s National Portrait Gallery. His talents as a painter are often considered to be inferior to his poetic skills, but such an assessment seems unreasonable when the artist died at age twenty-eight. Few artists have found their true style by that point, particularly those caught up in tumultuous times and not able to fully focus on their talents.
Self-Portraits and Perspectives
Rosenberg’s penchant for self-portraiture has also been noted, along with his tendency to use too small of a canvas and to improve his general appearance. Rosenberg’s place in British society as a Jew, however, surely colored his portraits of himself. Because not only was Rosenberg alive at a time when Jews were subject to strong prejudice, he was also a short, slight young man troubled by poor health and limited finances. He was not dashing or handsome like Rupert Brooke, and his artistic nature tended to make him solemn and introspective.
Keeping his image limited to a smaller canvas was a possible indication of how Rosenberg felt minimized and confined, and uncertain of his place in the world. In “The Jew”, Rosenberg indeed laments how despite being descended from Moses, he is still mocked by “the blond, the bronze” and “the ruddy” of the same “heaving blood.”
Rosenberg’s self-portraits offered him a chance to reinvent and reinterpret his persona, and to literally present a better face to the world. His self-assessments seem touching and hopeful at times, like the many self-portraits of the socially and creatively troubled Vincent van Gogh. Furthermore, as an almost-starving artist, Rosenberg was often unable to pay a model to pose and thus tended to turn to the man in the mirror for portrait practice.
Legacy and Loss
By 1916, Rosenberg had judged himself as being “more deep and true as a poet than a painter”—a fact which time may have indeed proven had he lived. Still, the warmth of tone and complexity of expression found in Rosenberg’s self-portraits suggest that perhaps a significant artistic talent was also lost on the Western Front, along with the lives of so many other brave men.
Sources
- First World War Poets – Alan Judd and David Crane (National Portrait Gallery Character Sketches, 1997)
- Modern American and British Poetry – Louis Untermeyer, Editor (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1942)
- Isaac Rosenberg: Self Portrait – Tate Britain
- Who Was Isaac Rosenberg? – ThisIsLondon.co.uk
