These books and anthology pieces have persisted, and Isaac Rosenberg is now considered one of our most significant ‘soldier-poets’. However, his artwork has remained largely neglected.

The Ben Uri Gallery has remedied us of his talent with this first exhibition on the painter-poet for fifteen years to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice and Rosenberg’s death.

‘Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle’ is the sixth exhibition in a series on the ‘The Whitechapel Boys’ which addresses the impact made upon Modernism by the East End group of Jewish artists based around Whitechapel Library and Art Gallery.

Born in 1890 in Bristol, Rosenberg was the second child of Russian, Yiddish-speaking Jewish émigrés from Lithuania. Leaving Bristol due to the anti-Semitic climate, the family finally settled in Stepney, in the East End of London, in 1897. Rosenberg’s father Barnett was a pious, cultured man from a family of Rabbis and scholars.

However, Barnett was forced to work as an itinerant peddler and, due to economic hardship, his mother Hachen went to work also, selling embroidery. Their marriage was difficult, and the family lived with increasing poverty.

Rosenberg’s upbringing did not provide a natural progression into the art world but early displays of talent and dedication attracted many patrons, including artists such as JH Amshewitz, Frank Lewish Emanuel, and poetry editor and secretary to Churchill, Edward Marsh. The mentors encouraged Rosenberg to pursue small presses, wider galleries, and competitions. Rosenberg distinguished himself quickly, attending the Slade after winning a Jewish scholarship, and Birkbeck College.

The Ben Uri Gallery has collected the largest ever display of Rosenberg’s self-portraits. In the early twentieth century the cultural battle between traditionalism and Modernism was raging and Rosenberg’s self-portraits express this conflict, revealing his desire to articulate Modernism while incorporating his Edwardian teaching and love of Renaissance artists and post-Impressionists.

As the self-portraits progress so does Rosenberg’s progression into Modernism, bright and contrasting colours appearing with subtle certainty and brush strokes leaning away from traditional Edwardian painting, becoming narrow strokes of patchwork colour. Rosenberg’s well-known striking ‘Self-Portrait with Trilby’ can be seen here in its many stages, which together reflect the struggle of self-representation within times of changing style and politics.

The exhibition also includes Rosenberg’s beautiful pencil and ink pictures, which vary from family portraits to post-Impressionistic nature studies, and Rosenberg’s portraits of female companions. Most famous of these is ‘Portrait of Sonia’, a friend and possible love, which later editor Ian Parsons named as ‘probably his best surviving work’.

Rosenberg drew on Rosseti and Da Vinci for the portrait, trying to take the Madonna he found so inspiring and placing it in Whitechapel. Rosenberg wrote of the painting in a letter to Edward Marsh: ‘I’ve done a lovely picture…It’s a girl who sat for Da Vinci, and hasn’t changed a hair, since, in a deep blue gown against a dull crimson background’.

The Gallery presents Rosenberg’s works within the context of The Whitechapel Boys with insightful understanding. The exhibition reviews the ‘little magazines’ used by many Jewish artists in the East End as springboards, as well as major works by Bomberg, Gertler, Rodker, Mininsky, Kramer and the only Whitechapel Girl, Winsten.

The Whitechapel Boys all had very different war experiences, and the inks and paintings displayed here provide an array of reactions. The collection also presents the variety in artistic expression at the time, from Bomberg’s stark geometric inks to Winsten’s dreamlike painting.

Ezra Pound and others encouraged Rosenberg as a poet, and he published two collections of his own 'Night and Day' (1912), and 'Youth' (1915) before the war, as well as appearing in poetry anthologies. The exhibition brings together originals of Rosenberg’s poems and letters, which reveal his continued efforts in painting and poetry after enlisting as a Private and going to the Front in 1915.

At the Front Rosenberg wrote ‘Poems from the Trenches’, a volume widely recognised as one of the greatest to emerge from the war. He was not a conventional soldier-poet however, his background separated him from the ‘Britishness’ expressed by Rupert Brooke, and thus of the particular disillusionment voiced by poets such as Sassoon and Owen.

Rosenberg’s faith and cultural environment leant entirely different imagery to his poems, seen for example in The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes. His instinctual poetical experimentation and Modernism meanwhile provided a different freedom within language and form that balanced the abstract and realistic, for example in poem Returning, We Hear The Larks: ‘Death could drop from the dark/ As easily as song-/ But song only dropped/ Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand…’

Rosenberg’s final poem Through these pale cold days was sent on the 28th March 1918 to his most dedicated patron, Edward Marsh. The painter-poet was sent out on a wiring party on the 21st of March, and did not return. This excellent exhibition succeeds in doing what the many poetry anthologies and collections have done for Rosenberg’s poetry: providing new perspective and deserved attention.