Part of a generation of Anglo-Jewish painters that included David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Jacob Kramer, Bernard Meninsky was born in the Ukraine and as a baby settled with his family in Liverpool. He studied at the Liverpool School of Art, the Académie Julian in Paris and the Slade School of Art in London, where he arrived in 1912. In 1914 he exhibited his work in the London Group exhibition at the Goupil Gallery and at the New English Art Club. Already a renowned figure draughtsman, Meninsky began teaching drawing at the Central School of Art of Arts and Crafts, the start of a highly successful and lifelong career as an art teacher.

His marriage in 1917 and the birth of a son the following year led the artist to produce a series of charming and intimate drawings of his wife nursing their child. Exhibited at the Goupil Gallery in 1919 (the artist’s first one-man show), the drawings served to enrich his reputation and were published in 1920 as Mother and Child: Twenty-eight Drawings by Bernard Meninsky.

The 1920’s found Meninsky painting nudes and landscapes, often of the South of France, which he first visited in 1922. He was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1923, where he exhibited regularly. Several gallery exhibitions of paintings, gouaches and watercolours were held in London galleries in the 1920's, 1930’s and 1940’s. Nevertheless, Meninsky achieved only a modest amount of critic appreciation in his lifetime, and indeed remains much less well known than many artists of his generation.

A shy and somewhat neurotic man, prone to depression and various phobias, Meninsky took his own life in 1950, at the age of 58. The following year a memorial exhibition was organized by the Arts Council in London; this was in fact to be the only retrospective exhibition of Meninsky’s work for the next thirty years, until another was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1981. Works by Meninsky are today in the collections of the British Museum, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Arts Council Collection, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, and several regional art galleries and museums.

Bernard Meninsky was a figurative artist whose love of the countryside and landscape shines through his stylised paintings. The present lot is an exquisite example of Meninsky's sturdy and strong figures that float across the serene tree lined landscape.

These figures, sometimes draped in toga-like classical attire was a motif Meninsky returned to. Meninsky's work is held in public collections including the Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design and National Gallery of Ireland. Meninsky was born in Konotop, Ukraine in 1891, but his family moved to Liverpool when he was still a baby.

He studied at the Liverpool School of Art from 1906. On scholarship Meninsky continued his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1912-1913. Meninsky's first solo show was held at the Goupil Gallery in 1919 and appointed life drawing tutor at the Westminster School of Art.

Bernard Meninsky, a Ukrainian artist, moved to Britain as a child and studied art in Liverpool before receiving a scholarship to study at the Slade between 1912-13. He was part of the Jewish émigré artist community alongside Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. Meninsky's war-time mural 'The Arrival, 1918' is housed in the Imperial War Museum collection. During the 1920s, he exhibited at the Goupil Gallery and was a respected tutor at Westminster School of Art. Meninsky also became linked with the Bloomsbury group during this period. He showcased his work at the 1914 London Group exhibition at the Goupil Gallery and at the New English Art Club.