© David Bomberg estate
This portrait depicts Bomberg’s close friend and fellow ‘Whitechapel Boy’, the modernist poet, essayist and publisher John Rodker (1894–1955). Bomberg designed a semi-abstract cover for the writer’s first collection of poems in 1914, based on studies of Rodker’s girlfriend Sonia Cohen performing a dance as a member of Margaret Morris’s famous troupe. Rodker reciprocated with reviews of Bomberg’s art, including one of Racehorses (1913) in The Dial Monthly in May 1914. During the First World War, Rodker went on the run, sheltering with the poet R. C. Trevelyan, but was eventually captured and imprisoned in Dartmoor. He later explored this experience in his account, Memoirs of Other Fronts, published anonymously in 1932. One of his many publishing projects included the short-lived Ovid Press (1919), which brought out work by the modernist poets T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.
