Before attending the Slade School of Fine Art in Bloomsbury (1908-12), Mark Gertler had grown up in a Jewish community around Spitalfields, in London’s East end. Many of his early pictures included friends and family as his subjects. His mother regularly modelled for him, often smartly dress but here the artist has depicted her as a peasant wearing a headscarf and a member of an archetypal poor immigrant Jewish family, inspired by folk art but also showing the influence of recent European art movements which had been displayed at Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912. The picture was shown at the Twentieth Century Art exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the New English Art Club in the summer of 1914 as ‘Family Group’ when the civil servant and collector Sir Edward Marsh (1872-1953), who had only recently began acquiring modern British art, became his patron and purchased it. It was among the huge bequest of over 200 artworks Marsh made to the Contemporary Art Society, after being its Chairman from 1936.
