Sir William Rothenstein and Sir John Rothenstein collection

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1872, William Rothenstein showed promise as an art student and in 1889 secured a place at the Academie Julian in Paris.

He was soon moving in circles that included artists such as Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and James McNeill Whistler. Returning to England in 1893, William Rothenstein began to receive commissions to paint the portraits of notable figures and became one of the best-known portrait painters of his time. He painted most of the celebrated figures of the period, including Max Beerbohm, Albert Einstein, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Bernard Shaw, Paul Verlaine, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and the Duke of Windsor. William Rothenstein married Alice Knewstub in 1899 and they settled in London, eventually moving to a farm in Gloucestershire. In 1917 he was elected to the Chair of Civic Art at Sheffield, and in 1920 he was appointed Principal of the Royal College of Art in London. Artists who studied under William Rothenstein included Edward Bawden, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth. William Rothenstein was awarded a knighthood in 1931. He died in 1945.

John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein, the oldest of the four children of William and Alice Rothenstein, was born in 1901. Educated at Oxford, where he shared rooms with William Gerhardi, who would become a novelist of some note, John Rothenstein gravitated towards a career as an author and critic. Meeting with little success in England, he moved to the United States in 1927 where he obtained positions teaching art history at the University of Kentucky and later the University of Pittsburgh. While in Kentucky, John Rothenstein married Elizabeth Kennard Smith; they returned to England in 1929. Here he completed a novel, Morning Sorrow, which was published in 1930, and earned his doctorate in the History of Art at University College London the following year. In 1932, he was appointed Director of Leeds City Art Gallery and in 1934 became Director of the Sheffield Art Galleries and Museums.

In 1938, John Rothenstein was appointed Director of the Tate Gallery in London, a position he held until his retirement in 1964. One of his initial tasks was to prepare the museum for the onset of the second world war. He found safe refuge for many of the museum’s most important works of art in country houses, castles, and other facilities. During the German bombardment, the Tate Gallery sustained significant damage, but John Rothenstein’s foresight allowed the collection to survive. Under his leadership, the Tate recovered from the effects of the war and emerged as a strong proponent of twentieth-century British Art, championing the work of such artists as Wyndham Lewis, Walter Sickert, and Matthew Smith.

John Rothenstein retired from the Tate in 1964 and devoted the rest of his life to writing and lecturing. Over the course of his career he wrote more than thirty books primarily on contemporary British art. His most important work was Modern English Painters (1952-1974); and his autobiography was published in three separate volumes between 1966 and 1970. John Rothenstein died in 1992. Chisholm, Anne and Michael Davie. Beaverbrook: A Life. London: Hutchinson, 1992. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004 “Rothenstein Family Library Acquired.” Newsletter of the UD Library Associates. September 2002, no. 43 Speaight, Robert. William Rothenstein: The Portrait of an Artist in his Time. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962. “William Rothenstein, Sir.” Almanac of Famous People, 8th ed. Gale Group, 2003. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004.