Ben Uri Gallery and Museum is delighted to announce an inter-museum transfer of an important Bloomsbury portrait of Sir Sydney Waterlow by Mark Gertler (1891–1939) as part of our commitment to release hidden quality works from long-term storage to generate greater public benefit.

Rosie Broadley, Head of Collections Displays (Victorian – Contemporary) at the National Portrait Gallery, said: “We are so grateful to Ben Uri Gallery and Museum for generously transferring this important work to the National Portrait Gallery. It’s a welcome addition to the Gallery’s Collection, which includes a number of key portraits depicting the sitter’s Bloomsbury contemporaries.”

Sarah MacDougall, Director, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum comments: “We are delighted that this important work has found the right home in such a distinguished national collection, alongside other Bloomsbury portraits by Gertler and others”.

About the artwork: This portrait of Sir Sydney Waterlow (1878–1944), known affectionately in his family as 'Monarch', captures the diplomat and Bloomsbury Group member (who once proposed marriage to Virginia Woolf) mid-career.
Waterlow was also a member of Gertler's all-male group of friends (predominantly writers and intellectuals), known as 'the Thursdays', who met weekly at his Hampstead home throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
An excellent likeness, the modulated skin tones and flamboyant moustache relieve the sober palette. This portrait was exhibited under the title 'Portrait of Mr. S. W.' at Gertler's second solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, London, in February 1922.

About the artist: ‘Whitechapel Boy’ Mark Gertler was born in Spitalfields, London to Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents, raised in London’s East End and attended the Slade School of Fine Art.
His best-known painting, Merry-go-Round (1916, Tate) capturing his pacifist sentiments, was painted at the height of the First World War.
Gertler socialised with members of the Bloomsbury Group at the London and Garsington homes of Lady Ottoline Morrell, including artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, art critic Clive Bell, and writers Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, with whom Gertler fell out over his unrequited love for his muse and fellow painter, Dora Carrington.

The Ben Uri Collection was formed in 1915 in London’s East End by Russian-Jewish decorative artist and craftsman Lazar Berson to support Jewish artists working outside the cultural mainstream.
The Collection, begun in 1919, principally reflects three waves of migration to the UK: first- and second-generation Eastern-European Jewish migration prior to the First World War; the so-called ‘Hitler émigrés’ (1933–45); and wider multicultural immigration after the Second World War.
Two-thirds of the artists exhibited by Ben Uri are immigrants and about one third (28%) are women. The average representation of women in UK national collections is around 4%.
Since 2018 Ben Uri has endeavoured to release rarely exhibited works back into the public domain, including gifting to other appropriately focused museums including the Jewish Museum, London; the Jewish Museum, Manchester; and Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem, as well as innovative long term loans to facilitate display including that of Solomon J Solomon’s The Field: The Artist’s Daughter on a Pony at Nightingale House, north London, and Hans Feibusch’s five monumental biblical panels, now hanging in St. Boniface in London’s East End, or through sale with the proceeds being reinvested in the museum/charity’s collection, academic research unit recording the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900, and digital transformation and dissemination through benuri.org.

For further information please contact: Sarah MacDougall Sarahm@benuri.org

For images please contact: Reka Vajda Rekav@benuri.org

Find out more at www.benuri.org

National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856 to encourage, through portraiture, the appreciation and understanding of the people who have made and are making British history and culture.
Today it promotes engagement with portraiture in all media to a wide-ranging public by conserving, growing and sharing the world’s largest collection of portraits.
The Gallery in St Martin’s Place, London, is currently closed until 2023, while essential building works take place on the Inspiring People redevelopment project, which will transform the Gallery, including a complete refurbishment of the building and a new learning centre.
During the closure period, the Gallery will continue to share its Collection through its digital channels and a series of nationwide partnerships and collaborations.

www.npg.org.uk