© Alfred Wolmark estate

Born in Edgbaston, the daughter of a draper, Mrs Ethel Solomon (née Cohen, 1888–1985), went on to become a highly influential figure as Chair of the Women’s Federation of British Zionists (1920) and as co-founder with her husband, Robert, of Whittingham Farm School, founded in 1939 to educate German and Austrian refugee children. It was Alfred Wolmark who introduced her to Ben Uri in the 1930s; between c. 1943 and 1966, she was Chair and helped to safeguard the collection during the Second World War. Under her Chairmanship, the Society's activities greatly expanded to include not only lectures but also art classes, drama and music.

Using a bold, loose paint handling, Wolmark shows Ethel Solomon as a fashionable young woman in black-and-white riding attire, offset by her mustard-yellow gloves, the putty-coloured background emphasising her fresh complexion. The portrait shows Wolmark at a key transitional moment between his early Rembrandtesque manner and dark palette, anticipating his notable conversion to colour after 1911. He also uses the dramatic pose as a compositional device to indicate his sitter’s strong character. The portrait, signed with an early version of his trademark monogram, relates to his later series of single-figure works including 'The Fencer' (c. 1914, current whereabouts unknown), which repeats the emphatic hand-on-hip gesture, and the 'Portrait of Dottie Konstam' (aka Mrs Alfred Kohnstamm, 1915, Private Collection), in which his female subject holding her parasol echoes the strong diagonal of Mrs Solomon grasping her riding crop. Wolmark executed many portraits of Jewish sitters including the head of the writer Israel Zangwill (1925, Ben Uri Collection), Ben Uri's first President from 1921–24, who was known as the ‘Jewish Dickens’.