Who was Isaac Rosenberg?

The springboard for the book is an exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, earnest, pious and too small, from which Rosenberg emerges as a minor and uncertain talent never fully formed, the available material so limited in quantity and so modest in attack that it is almost swamped by the ambition demonstrated in the accompanying examples of work by his associates and peers. He was an adequate draughtsman in the manners favoured by the Slade School, his portrait studies remarkably sensitive to the sitter's character, but — to put it bluntly — with little to distinguish them as Rosenbergs, they could easily be mistaken for the work of a hundred other students at that conspicuously regulated school. His nude figure studies have the same Slade stamp, and so too have his very few attempts to construct a complex composition.

Rosenberg joined the Slade in October 1911, a month short of his 21st birthday, and left it in March 1913, a period perhaps both too late and too short to develop him from a largely self-taught amateur into a rigorous professional. The school gave him prizes that now seem scarcely merited, so of its time was all his work, so Slade, so Camden Town, so New English Art Club, so very John and Lamb. A larger exhibition, including paintings from his South African period — nine months in 1914-15 in which he was entirely free to draw, paint and lecture — might have broadened our view of him, and so too might more of the little London and other landscapes from his Slade period, but the total number of his paintings and drawings must be very small and the book, unfortunately, makes little effort to fill the exhibition's many gaps and none at all to list the known surviving works.

The visitor who knows nothing of Rosenberg must, with self-portraits providing one-third of his exhibited work, form the impression that he was obsessed with himself; I suspect, however, that this was far from so, and that instead, intending to earn a living from portraiture, he practised the skills of likeness and flattery on his most easily available model. That flattery did indeed play a part is evident in his treatment of his nose, for instead of the fine-boned aquiline feature that we see in photographs and portraits of him by his friends, he gave himself a nose that was long, thin and retroussé — an intriguing fib. In these and other portraits he adopted a characteristic handling in which paint was applied with short vertical strokes of the brush; with them he fumbled his way towards form, volume and tonal unity, occasionally lending definition to jaw, collar and fingers with drawn lines, adding contrast and excitement with the pink or red of a tie. Some could hang with the then very recent portraits (and other paintings) by Sickert, Gilman and Gore (influenced by them, perhaps) without seeming particularly out of their depth, but in the most ambitious, a half-length of more than twice his customary size, he could not manage the extended scale (though the canvas is only 76cm tall), and the fumbling brushwork combines with a pose awkwardly misunderstood, to make a ragged nonsense of what, had it been no more than head and hat, might have seemed bravura work.

David Bomberg thought Rosenberg "a good poet but no painter". Should this be our verdict too? Rosenberg himself, writing in July 1916, agreed: "I am convinced I am more deep and true as a poet than a painter." I think there is too little of both poetry and painting to tell. Though in wretched health, as ever, he enlisted in the autumn of 1915 — a volunteer, it must be stressed, though essentially a pacifist and the child of Lithuanian émigrés who spoke little or no English (Whitechapel at War is the most telling chapter of the book). In the early hours of 1 April 1918, laying barbed wire in the dark to impede a German attack, he was killed. What was left of him is buried in a war cemetery near Arras under a headstone inscribed "Artist and Poet". The sentimental among us will not question that.

Isaac Rosenberg is at The Ben Uri Gallery, NW8 (020 7604 3991, wwwbenuri.org.uk). Until 8 June. Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm, Sun 12-4pm, Closed Sat. Admission £5. Whitechapel at War, Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle, edited by Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson (Ben Uri Gallery, £25).