On August 17, 1889, philanthropist, artist, and social activist Rose (Loewe) Henriques was born in Stoke Newington, London, to an Orthodox Jewish family. She would spend her adult life in the city’s East End, providing social welfare offerings to the largely Jewish population and documenting the area’s experience of the tumultuous early twentieth century in her acclaimed paintings.

After spending her teenage years living with her aunts in Poland, Rose Loewe returned to London and met Jewish reformist Basil Henriques, whom she married in 1916. Throughout their relationship, Rose and Basil collaborated on social welfare projects to benefit the surrounding community as well as broader populations, especially in times of war. In 1914, Basil founded the Oxford and St George’s Jewish Boys’ Club in the Jewish quarter of the East End neighborhood of Stepney, and in 1915, Rose founded a comparable club for Jewish girls. By 1919, the Henriqueses merged these two clubs to create the St George Jewish Settlement in Betts Street, open to both Jews and non-Jews.

The Settlement directed its welfare and recreation offerings to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to aid in their adjustment to life in England. The Henriqueses lived at the Settlement and were affectionately called “the gaffer” and “the missus” by community members, though their commitment to providing aid to people extended far beyond the Settlement. Rose worked as a nurse in London during World War I and an ambulance driver in World War II and, at the end of the war, traveled to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany to provide aid to survivors with the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad.

As she took on this varied philanthropic work, Henriques also devoted much of her time to art, documenting her community’s experience of life during and after war. Her sketches and paintings of Jewish communities in the East End regularly appeared at Whitechapel Gallery beginning in 1934, and she had two solo shows at the same gallery: “Stepney in War & Peace” in 1947 and “Vanishing Stepney” in 1961. A number of these paintings are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of London, as historians and art historians stress the documentary value of these depictions of everyday life in London’s growing Jewish community during the crises of the early twentieth century.

Sources:

Ayad, Sara. “Rose Henriques: Philanthropist, Activist and Painter of London’s Jewish East End | Art UK.” artuk.org, June 9, 2019. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/rose-henriques-philanthropist-activist-and-painter-of-londons-jewish-east-end.

Figes, Lydia. “Ten Women Artists of Jewish Heritage Represented in UK Collections | Art UK.” artuk.org, September 22, 2020. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/ten-women-artists-of-jewish-heritage-represented-in-uk-collections.

“Yard, now Basil House, Berner Street” Accessed June 16, 2022. https://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/98888.html