Mark Gertler (1891-1939)

Painter, born in Spitalfields, London, the son of Polish refugees. In Gertler's childhood, his family, in desperate poverty, moved to Austria, then America, before settling back in London in 1896. Gertler studied at Regent Street Polytechnic, 1906, but the following year, at his father's insistence, was apprenticed in a stained-glass works. In 1908 he entered the Slade, with financial assistance from the Jewish Education Aid Society and in 1910 won the Slade prize for portrait painting. Here he was associated with the Whitechapel Boys but left the Slade in 1912, having already made friends with the patron Edward Marsh, and the artist, Dora Carrington, who brought him into the Bloomsbury set and with Lady Ottoline Morrell. Through them, he exhibited with the Friday Club and went on to paint his most famous picture, Merry-Go-Round, (now in the Tate Gallery) in 1916. As a conscientious objector, this was a clear statement of Gertler's abho