Signed and dated l.l.: Wolmark/27

In a highly decorative period carved-wood frame

Oil on canvas, 63 by 76 cm (24 ¾ by 30 ins)

Provenance: with the Fine Art Society in the mid 1970s

Exhibited: Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, Alfred Wolmark Exhibition, March-April 1975, no.5

Wolmark remains one of the great neglected émigré artists to be working in Britain in the first few decades of the twentieth century. His early work bears homage to his Jewish heritage and there is a strong decorative element to his later portraits. It is through two female friends who Wolmark met in Paris that he decided to visit Tunis, arriving in the city in early December 1926. The city was to have a profound impact on the artist who was struck by the poverty and basic conditions of the place but also greatly affected by the city’s exotic colour: “You have no idea how picturesque those Arab and Jewish women are, full of colour, colour such that even I could not dare before” (from a letter to the artist’s wife Bessie). That sense of colour and exoticism touches on the fine body of work he created there, most of which depicts the city’s Jewish ghetto and larger Arab population. Some of the sitters in Market Scene, Tunis one of the most significant works he produced there, can be identified in smaller portraits and other subject pictures from the same date. Here Wolmark reminds us of his genius in imbuing his subjects (in this case the Arab crowd) with a strong sense of both humanity and monumentality – the same qualities he had displayed in his earlier paintings of Jewish life. We are grateful to Peter Risdon for his assistance.