Self-Portrait

This early self-portrait is consistent with Wolmark's then Rembrandtesque style and palette and presents a quieter, less bravura personality than the later self-portraits after his conversion to modernism in 1911. It was owned by German-Jewish émigrée Anna Wilmersdoerffer (1859-1919), a valuable early mentor and patron, who helped to promote Wolmark's early work, organised his 1905 solo exhibition at the Bruton Galleries in London, and whose modernist portrait, 'The Cossack Hat' (1911) is in the Ferens Art Gallery Hull. Wolmark uses a similar dark Rembrandtesque palette in his monumental oil painting, 'The Last Days of Rabbi ben Ezra (1905, on loan to Ben Uri Collection), which formed the centrepiece of his Bruton Galleries exhibition, and which also includes a mischievous self-portrait of a headscarfed, moustached and more Bohemian personality in the background (upper left).

Wolmark appears in many other portraits in the collection covering most of his career including a dandified portrait by Ernest Borough-Johnson (c. 1909-15), a caricature in Alfred Adrian Wolfe's cartoon of the 1917 art committee, and in later portraits by Polish-Jewish émigré Max Sokol (c. 1939) and Ben Uri's longstanding Treasurer Cyril Ross (c. 1950s).