© Alfred Wolmark estate

This watercolour is the first or second in a series of fourteen book illustrations Wolmark made to accompany the complete works of Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), the foremost Anglo-Jewish writer of his generation. Known as ‘the Jewish Dickens’, Zangwill’s best-known novel, Children of the Ghetto (1892), vividly described the Whitechapel slums; he also wrote the play The Melting Pot (1908) depicting American Jewish immigrant life and its rich mix of cultures. Both Wolmark and Zangwill were closely associated with Ben Uri from the early 1920s, Zangwill as President in 1922-23, and Wolmark as Vice President for almost a quarter of a century, from 1923-56.