In later life he became a portrait painter and his portraits of the rich and famous included Mahatma Gandhi, Frederick Delius, Sybil Thorndike and Anna Pavlova.
Bernard Ramsden
Leeds School of Art was founded in 1846. It is now known as the Leeds Arts University but for the period 1968 to 1993 it was called Jacob Kramer College. Jacob Kramer was born in the Ukraine in 1892. His father was a painter who studied at the St Petersburg Fine Art Academy, and his mother was a singer who performed traditional Slavic and Hebrew folk songs. They fled to Leeds in 1900 to escape a Russian pogrom.
In 1907 Jacob gained a scholarship to the Leeds School of Art where he studied for six years. While he was studying at the art school he became a member of the Leeds Arts Club. It was considered to be a radical modernist organisation, and it introduced Jacob to the ideas of expressionist artists. He was himself later considered to be an English Expressionist.
He became an established artist, and went on to teach at the Leeds School of Art, where he had started as a student. In the 1920s and 1930s he became one of Britain’s greatest artists, renowned for his sharp, angular paintings. He developed his own style, inspired by and drawing on his Jewish roots.
In later life he became a portrait painter and his portraits of the rich and famous included Mahatma Gandhi, Frederick Delius, Sybil Thorndike and Anna Pavlova.
He died on the 4 February 1962, was unmarried and with no children. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Gildersome. It was in Leeds that he discovered the depths of his Jewish soul and conveyed that identity so distinctively on canvas. Leeds was where he chose to work and live, and Kramer noted that, “For myself, I find more stimulus in Leeds than in London and even in Paris”.