Jacob Kramer

Jacob Kramer (26 December 1892 – 4 February 1962) was a Ukrainian-born painter who spent all of his working life in England.

Jacob Kramer was born in the small town of Klintsy in 1892, then part of the Russian Empire, into an artistic middle-class Jewish family, who moved to Saint Petersburg shortly after. His father, Max, was a painter who had studied at the St Petersburg Fine Art Academy under Ilya Repin, and had become a court painter to Baron Ginsburg. Kramer's mother, Cecilia, was also artistic being a trained singer who was well known for touring a regional network of theatres established by her father, at which she performed traditional Slavic and Hebrew folk songs. He had two sisters.

In the anti-Jewish events following assassination of the Tsar the family, like many Jews decided to leave. The father. Max, was in poor health so would not pass the health checks for admission to the USA, so instead they came to England, arriving in Leeds (which had an established Jewish population) in 1900.

In 1902, aged only ten, Kramer ran away from his new home in Leeds, taking various jobs in different parts of the north of England, and even going away to sea for six months, being big for his age. During this sojourn away from his family Kramer attended occasional art classes, but his first formal art education was at Leeds School of Art where he had a scholarship from 1907 till 1913. During this time he was also to become involved in the radical modernist organisation the Leeds Arts Club, which introduced him to the ideas of expressionist artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky and the spiritualist beliefs that came to underpin his work. Writing to his close friend and fellow Arts Club member Herbert Read in 1918, Kramer stated that when he looked at an object he saw both its physical appearance and its spiritual manifestation. His struggle, he claimed, was to escape the physical appearance and only paint the spiritual form. Such ideas came straight from the expressionist and Theosophical spiritualism that dominated the Leeds Arts Club, and show clearly that Kramer was himself an English Expressionist artist.

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