His self-portraits have become famous. He painted many of them, not because he was self-involved, although he was, but because he could seldom afford models. For his poetry, even Ezra Pound offered an insufferably patronising recommendation to an editor:

I think you may as well give this poor devil a show… He has something in him, horribly rough, but then… Stepney East…

Others called him ‘little Rosenberg’ (he was five foot two); it was not only his poverty that was against him. There is a beautiful drawing here, of Ruth Löwy, who later married Victor Gollancz. Sixty years later she remembered his ‘poor physical equipment, muffled voice, bad adenoids and shocking teeth’. Inevitably, you want to be on his side.

Reluctantly, he volunteered for the army (and was put into ‘the Bantams’) so that his mother would have an allowance. Israel Zangwill, chronicler of Jewish immigration — said to have coined the phrase ‘melting pot’ — wrote to Isaac’s sister: ‘I hope his experience of war will give his next book the clarity and simplicity somewhat lacking in this.’ In a way it did, made his vocabulary more concrete, enlivened him, as it did his contemporary Ivor Gurney. This is Rosenberg’s second admiring biography, but doubts remain.

Remembering the obstacles he had to overcome, it seems almost disloyal not to be able to respond to his verse. Forthright Geoffrey Grigson, not quoted here, puts it well. ‘How one would like Rosenberg to be a good poet, how many people have told us that he was a good poet, when he wasn’t.’ The paintings, the portraits, were another matter. ‘Devoid of swank,’ says Grigson. ‘No fumbling. No muddling weakness. Perhaps it was the painter, not the poet, who would have won through, but for that shell or bullet on 1 April 1918.’ His body was never found.

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