Rose Henriques

Lady Rose L. Henriques, née Loewe, (1889-1972) was a British artist and social and charity worker in the East End of London, where she was born and lived throughout her life.

Henriques was the daughter of James Loewe, a community worker and scholar in the Stoke Newington area of London. Although she trained as a pianist, after her marriage to Basil Henriques in 1917 she decided to concentrate on social work. The couple worked on a number of joint enterprises together. From 1914 until 1948, they were the joint wardens of the St George's Jewish Settlement in Stepney, later known as the Bernhard Baron St George's Jewish Settlement. The settlement housed a number of social and educational clubs. During World War I, Rose Henriques worked as a nurse at Liverpool Street station and in World War II, she served as an air-raid warden and also organized an emergency feeding scheme for people whose homes had been destroyed in the Blitz. During the Blitz, she completed a large number of drawings and paintings of events in the East End, many of which are now held by the Museum of London. At the start of World War II, Henriques applied to work for the War Artists' Advisory Committee, but it was only later in the conflict that the Committee purchased one of her watercolours.

When the war ended, Henriques went to Germany where she worked alongside a number of Jewish welfare groups at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then at the nearby displaced persons camp. On returning to England, Henriques was the chair of the British Ose Society for promoting mental and physical health and foundered Workrooms for the Elderly in east London. In the East End she promoted local musicians and artists and continued to paint London street scenes. In 1947 the Whitechapel Art Gallery hosted an exhibition of her work, Stepney in War & Peace, while a further hundred of her works were shown at the same venue as Vanishing Stepney in 1961.

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