WALTER RICHARD SICKERT, A.R.A. | A CHILD OF THE GHETTO, MR ISRAEL ZANGWILL

The Leicester Galleries, London

Acquired by Mr Logan Pearsall Smith at the 1941 exhibition

A. Harari

The Fine Art Society, London, where acquired by Edgar Astaire, 30 June 1995

Christie's, London, 26 June 2015, lot 124

Vanity Fair, 25 February 1897, illustrated 

Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, 1973, cat. no.96, p.315

Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, cat. no.79.2, pp.199-200 

London, The Leicester Galleries, The First Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture by Artists of Fame and Promise, Summer 1941, cat. no.38

The present work depicts Israel Zangwill (1964-1926), the Zionist Jewish leader and writer who was an acquiantance of Sickert's first wife Ellen Cobden. The work is distinctly Whistlerian in its style and tone notably in the muted and closely modulated greys of the background. The present work was a sketch for Vanity Fair which was published on 25 February 1897. It was called A Child of the Ghetto after the title of a story by Zangwill set in the Venetian ghetto and which had been recently published.

There is an oil portrait of Israel Zangwill by Sickert in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.