Isaac Rosenberg
- Artist: Isaac Rosenberg
- Date: 1915
- Medium: oil on panel
- Dimensions: 11 5/8 in. x 8 3/4 in. (295 mm x 222 mm)
- Portrays: Isaac Rosenberg
- Museum: The National Portrait Gallery
- Collection record: The National Portrait Gallery website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
Before you is the self‑portrait “Isaac Rosenberg”, painted in oil on panel in 1915. The canvas measures about 11½ by 8¾ inches, a small but intense frame that forces us into the artist’s eye. He sits alone, his face calm and focused, wearing a trilby hat – the fashionable headwear of London artists at the time. The brushwork is loose yet controlled; you can see how he builds light over the linen cloth in the background.
Rosenberg painted this portrait the same year he enlisted in the army, right before heading to France with the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. He was a poet as well as a painter, and his later war poems like “Dead Man’s Dump” reflected the conflict’s direct experience. His own work shows a move toward a more modernist style that had begun in 1914.
This portrait entered the National Portrait Gallery through a donation from the Robert Gavron Charitable Trust, a gift made by the sitter’s sister, Annie Wynick, in 1959. The piece sits here as an intimate glimpse of a young artist on the brink of war.
See it in person
Isaac Rosenberg is in the collection of The National Portrait Gallery at St Martin's Place, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
