Portrait of Mrs Ethel Solomon in Riding Habit

Born in Edgbaston, the daughter of a draper, Mrs Ethel Solomon (née Cohen, 1888–1985), went on to become a highly influential figure as Chair of the Women’s Federation of British Zionists (1920) and as co-founder with her husband of Whittinghame Farm School, founded in 1939 to educate German and Austrian refugee children. Between 1943 and 1966, she was also Chair of Ben Uri.

Using a bold, loose paint handling, Wolmark shows Ethel Solomon as a fashionable young woman in black-and-white riding attire, offset by her mustard-yellow gloves, the putty-coloured background emphasising her fresh complexion. The portrait shows Wolmark at a key transitional moment between his early Rembrandtesque manner and dark palette, anticipating his notable conversion to colour after 1911.

Wolmark also uses the dramatic pose as a compositional device to indicate his sitter’s strong character. The portrait also relates specifically to his later series of single-figure works including "The Fencer" (c.1914, current whereabouts unknown), which repeats the emphatic hand-on-hip gesture, and the "Portrait of Dottie Konstam" (aka Mrs. Alfred Kohnstamm, 1915, Private Collection), in which his female subject holding her parasol echoes the strong diagonal of Mrs Solomon grasping her riding crop. The work is boldly signed with an early version of Wolmark’s monogram.

Wolmark executed many portraits of Jewish sitters including a head of the writer Israel Zangwill (1925, Ben Uri Collection), known as the ‘Jewish Dickens’. The Ben Uri Collection also holds 13 of the 14 illustrations that formed frontispieces to the multi-volume edition of Zangwill’s work published in 1925, and an equally striking head-and-shoulders portrait of Mrs Herbert Cohen, which Mrs Ethel Solomon, herself a notable collector, presented to Ben Uri.