As an avid writer, it was no surprise that novelists and playwrights were among the many friendships William Rothenstein courted, and whose portraits he took. His own volumes of autobiography would be filled with anecdotes and insights into British cultural life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Best known today for his 1898 comic play, Trelawny of the “Wells”, Arthur Wing Pinero’s dramas were very successful in the late Victorian period.

Rothenstein’s life and career was appraised by his son, John, in his fascinating collection of short biographies, Modern English Painters. It was John Rothenstein’s opinion that, at the start of the twentieth century, ‘a radical change’ had begun to manifest itself in his father’s work, ‘involving both loss and gain [...]. It was a change due perhaps mainly to intellectual conviction, but it may be in part the consequence of some psychic disturbance possibly unconnected with painting.’ My suggestion, laid out in my introduction to this catalogue, was that this ‘psychic disturbance’ was to do with Rothenstein’s encounter with the brilliant early work of Augustus John and William Orpen.

But as John Rothenstein continued, prior to this change, his father’s work had been ‘distinguished by an eager curious insight into character, whether of face, or figure, or of locality, which expressed itself, notwithstanding his obvious high spirits and irrepressible humour, with a grave, disciplined detachment. His drawing, elegant and tenuous though it was, showed a surprisingly sure grasp of form.’


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Born in Bradford in January 1872, William Rothenstein was the son of a wealthy German-Jewish businessman who, a decade earlier, had moved with his wife to work in the Yorkshire textile industry. Exactly six years John’s senior, Rothenstein had gone to the Slade in 1888, where a fellow student recalled him as ‘brimful of vitality and formidable intelligence.’ He had been unimpressed by the school, however, which was then under the direction of the French artist Alphonse Legros, and he had gone to Paris to study at the Académie Julian instead.

In Paris Rothenstein met Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec and Lucien Pissarro, and enjoyed early success as an artist with works such as Parting at Morning (1891), now in the Tate collection. In 1893 however, he returned to England, and his brother, Albert, who was then studying at the Slade, introduced him to John and Orpen. Of the two, Rothenstein preferred John’s work, considering it to possess ‘more magic’. Rothenstein would later write that John’s talent and dynamism had helped ‘raise the standard of drawing among Slade students in dazzling fashion’.