ALBERT RUTHERSTON, RWS
(1881-1953)
The Meeting with Caius Lucius – Illustration for The Tragedie of Cymberline
Signed with initials l.r.
Pen and ink
Unframed
4.5 by 13 cm., 1 ¾ by 5 in.
(mount size 39.5 by 33 cm., 15 ½ by 13 in.)
Provenance:
Estate of the artist
Exhibited:
London, Sally Hunter Fine Art, Albert Rutherston, Drawings, Theatre Designs and other Treasures, 2016, no.65
The present work was illustrated in Cymbeline, published by Ernest Benn in 1923. The series was a collaboration between Rutherston and Harley Granville-Barker following on from their work together 11 years earlier at the Savoy Theatre and celebrating the quatercentenary of the Shakespeare Folio edition.
Born Albert Daniel Rothenstein, he was the youngest of the six children of Moritz and Bertha Rothenstein, German-Jewish immigrants who had settled in Bradford, Yorkshire in the 1860s. He and his siblings proved to be a hugely talented and artistic family, his elder brother became Sir William Rotherstein (1872-1945), the artist and director of the Royal College of Art; two of his other siblings, Charles Rutherston and Emily Hesslein, both accumulated major modern British and French art collections and his nephew Sir John Rothenstein was direct of the Tate Gallery.
He was educated at Bradford Grammar School before moving to London in 1898 to study at the Slade School of Art where he became close friends with Augustus John and William Orpen. He met Walter Sickert during a painting holiday in France in 1900 and by introducing Sickert to Spencer Gove became instrumental in the beginning of the Camden Town Group. He was one of Sickert’s most frequent companions and was one of the original members of the Fitzroy Street Group. Rutherston had a sociable and attractive personality, he frequently travelled abroad with other artists including Max Beerbohm, Spencer Gore, Walter Russell and Edna Clarke Hall...
Category
Early 20th Century Realist Figurative Drawings and Watercolors