© Alfred Wolmark estate
'Sabbath Afternoon' is a key transitional work in Wolmark's oeuvre, marking his move away from his earlier Rembrandtesque style and towards modernism, as he experiments with a new handling of paint and touches of a lighter palette. Wolmark was familiar with Polish painter Samuel Hirszenberg's oil 'Sabbath Rest' (1894, Ben Uri Collection), set in Warsaw, but significantly chose to transpose his subjects to a typical London East End setting in a journey much like his own from East to West. To underline their Orthodoxy, Wolmark shows his couple absorbed in their Sabbath studies, including important details of Jewish religious observance, such as the Bessamim (ceremonial spice tower) on the table. Yet the focus has shifted from interior to exterior and from domestic to industrial, as the sun setting over the city’s smoking chimneys is glimpsed through the window behind. It is not the interior or its inhabitants but the brilliantly lit, urban townscape beyond which provides the focus for the composition, identifying Wolmark with a modernist motif typical of his Camden Town contemporaries.
