Isaac Rosenberg was born into a Jewish immigrant family in Bristol, England on 25 November 1890 and raised in great poverty in Whitechapel. Despite an early talent for drawing and writing, by the age of fourteen he was unhappily apprenticed to a firm of Fleet Street engravers. He took evening art classes at Birkbeck College, London, where he won many prizes, before following Mark Gertler and David Bomberg to the Slade School of Fine Art (1911–14). Often unable to afford models, his oeuvre includes many self-portraits as well as landscapes and works on literary themes. In 1914 his work was included in the so-called 'Jewish Section' co-curated by Bomberg and Jacob Epstein as part of 'Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements' at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Afterwards Rosenberg visited his sister in South Africa where he painted, wrote and lectured about art, before returning to England in 1915. After enlisting in the army in October 1915, he was sent to the Front in 1916, from where he sent home his poignant Self-portrait in Steel Helmet (1916). He was killed, aged 27, while on patrol in Fampoux, France on 1 April 1918. Despite publishing only two short collections of poetry during his lifetime, Rosenberg is now regarded as one of the finest War Poets of his generation. The exhibition, 'Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle' (Ben Uri, 2008), was the first to examine his art in the context of his Whitechapel peers. Rosenberg's work is in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Imperial War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and UCL.