Portrait of Lord Rothschild

The British Jewish banker, politician, zoologist, and member of the Rothschild family, Lord Lionel Walter de Rothschild (1868-1937), founder of the eponymous Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire, sat to Kramer for his portrait in 1921, at Buckingham House, the home of Kramer’s patron Michael Sadler, then Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University. Kramer's sensitive pastel profile portrait, presents his now elderly, white haired and bearded sitter as more serious, introspective, and slighter of build than Rothschild appears in earlier portraits by other artists. This pastel is part of a body of portraiture of Kramer's family, friends, Jewish figures and 'celebrities', which became the focus of the artist's work after his return to Leeds.