Jacob Kramer (26 Dec. 1892 – 4 Feb. 1962); Ukrainian-born painter who spent all of his working life in England. Jacob Kramer was born in the small town of Klintsy, 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.... He had two sisters. In the anti-Jewish events following assassination of the Tsar, the family, like many Jews, decided to leave. His father Max was in poor health so could not pass the health checks for admission to the USA, so instead they went to England, arriving in Leeds (which had an established Jewish population) in 1900. In 1902, aged only 10, 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 6 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 organization 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 paint only the spiritual form.... ....He became an established artist, and also taught at the Leeds School of Art. As a portrait painter, his sitters included Mahatma Gandhi and Frederick Delius. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Kramer) undefined

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