‘Sam Rabin (1903–1991): The Art of the Ring’
Ben Uri Gallery, Boundary Road, London NW8 5 February–1 May 2026
Bill Crow
Sam Rabin
Duchesne Books, Chillesford, Suffolk 2024 (no ISBN number)
Thomas Tuohy
Sam Rabin was ‘discovered’ at the age of 80, and his work was exposed to public view through an exhibition of 69 works and a slender publication of 31 pages in 1985 at Dulwich Picture Gallery when Giles Waterfield was director. That show was curated by John Sheeran, an alumnus of Dulwich College who, together with his wife Imogen, had befriended Rabin in the 1980s. The exhibition was also shown in Salford and Southampton, venues reflecting Rabin’s origins in Manchester and his later teaching in Bournemouth. Sheeran later directed Bill Crow to uncatalogued material deposited at the Metropolitan University of Manchester by Stanley Paine, Rabin’s pupil, then colleague, at Goldsmiths College. This archive also has the letters of the illustrator Barnet Freedman (1901–1958), Rabin’s close friend, of whom he modelled a portrait bust that was admired by Epstein. This archival material features in a new book about the artist, based upon a dissertation Crow wrote in 2010.
He was born Samuel Rabinovich to Russian Jewish emigrés in Cheetham, Manchester, and then the family moved to Salford. His talent for drawing was encouraged by his parents, and he took up boxing in Salford Lads’ Club. Boxing and wrestling were encouraged for urban youth at the time, and several Jewish immigrants went on to have notable careers. Samuel declared to his father, at the age of eleven, that he wanted to ‘become an artist and be the strongest man in the world’. At that age he won a scholarship to study at the Manchester School of Art. He was taught by Pierre Adolf Villette (1876–1942) who had studied graphic design and commercial art in St Etienne, Lyon and Bordeaux, and may have known Degas. Villette produced oil paintings of misty urban Manchester, which had some impact on Samuel’s fellow-pupil LS Lowry.
Villette’s emphasis on the primacy of drawing was reinforced by Henry Tonks when Samuel went to the Slade – from 1921 to 1924. He became one of Tonks’s favourite pupils, referred to as ‘Tonks’ Donkeys’. In London he knew other Jewish artists: David Bomberg, Alfred Wolmark and Mark Gertler, in addition to Barnet Freedman. In 1925 Samuel was in Paris, where he was impressed by the modelling sculptor Charles Despiau (1847–1946). At the Slade, sculpture was taught by George Harvard Thomas (1893–1933), with emphasis on physically demanding stone carving, and it was he who recommended Samuel to Frank Pick, the man in charge of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London (UERL), who commissioned Charles Holden to build the company headquarters, above St James’s Park station in Westminster. Epstein was responsible for two large groups near street level, but eight reliefs, with horizontal figures of Winds, were carried out by Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Samuel Rabinovich, together with two other Slade contemporaries. Samuel’s drawing for The West Wind, inspired by Epstein’s tomb of Oscar Wilde in Paris, was selected by Charles Holden and given to the team leader, Eric Gill, to serve as a model to the other sculptors. In 1930 Samuel carved two stone heads, Past and Future, for the exterior of the new Daily Telegraph building in London, and all of these three commissions were carved in situ.
Failing to find further sculpture commissions, or a post teaching drawing, Samuel took to wrestling and boxing, and won a bronze medal for wrestling at the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928. Although neither of these occupations was lucrative, he gained some publicity. As a wrestler he was described in a Portsmouth paper: ‘The Adonis-like Hebrew Rabin gets to work with all the grace of a champion of old Olympia.’ In old age, when asked how he was, the reply was always ‘as good looking as ever’. By 1932, when he became a professional wrestler, he was calling himself Sam Rabin. Bill Crow suggests that he was something of a showman. In 1933 he was cast by the film producer Alexander Korda as the champion wrestler in The Private Life of Henry VIII. He trained Charles Laughton for his part in the wrestling scene and in 1934 he played the Jewish prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza in The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the same year William Roberts painted a fight scene Sam Rabin versus Black Eagle.
Still failing to find a teaching job he turned to singing, having a bass baritone voice with a Russian quality, which was coached by the French Algerian baritone Dinh Gilly and the singing teacher Albert Garcia. During the War, Rabin met musicians while serving with the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) team in Hampstead, where he had a studio. He wrote: ‘Many professional artists and musicians had often said to my father that a musical education was worth the expense. Yet I consider it my duty to justify the money and the effort that my parents, who were very poor, had expended on my artistic education.’ It is not clear if Rabin had any musical training as a boy, and Crow expresses a lack of interest in his musical career, but refers to extensive material on the subject in the Manchester archive.
Rabin sang for the BBC during the War. ‘Stars in Battledress’, a popular form of entertainment, was less to Rabin’s taste – he hated the jokes – than the Army Classical Music Group. Rabin’s audition with the BBC was facilitated by the father of John Mansbridge (1901–1981), a fellow-artist who painted his portrait in the 1920s when they shared a flat off Tottenham Court Road. It was Mansbridge, who taught at Goldsmith’s College from 1929, who later recommended Rabin as teacher of drawing there, a position he held from 1949 until 1965. These were the most fulfilling years of his life, and his method of teaching, by providing daily demonstration drawings from a model for each of his students, sustained the tradition of life-drawing, the basis of figurative art since the 15th century. Quentin Crisp was his favourite model. Reforms to teaching in art schools, implemented by the Coldstream Report, abandoning life drawing, and led to Rabin’s resignation, but he continued to teach drawing at Bournemouth College of Art (1965–85) and, after retirement, at the Poole Art Centre.
Very few early works survive as he destroyed many of them himself, and then lost what he had kept when his landlady threw them away during the War. He began exhibiting at Wildenstein & Co Ltd, London, in 1951, with life drawings and coloured drawings of boxers, made with his own materials made of wax. He did no painting, but made ‘drawings with colour’. In 1957 he was married, for the second time, to Frances Karpeles, who managed his business affairs, acting as a secretary, and in 1960 he had an exhibition at the prestigious Leicester Galleries. A review by Charles S Spencer for the London Letter stated: ‘As a draughtsman he can be compared to Degas, and this is no exaggeration… what Degas did for ballet dancers, Rabin does for boxers.’ In 1975 he exhibited in Paris, ‘L’Art et la Boxe’, at the Galerie Chardin, which was later shown in London at Campbell and Franks in New Cavendish Street. The Musée National du Sport in Nice has 10 works by Rabin, more than any collection in Great Britain.
Rabin rarely dated his works, but most that survive are from after his years at Goldsmiths. He had a model boxing ring in his garden studio in Bournemouth and his mature works seem to be exclusively related to boxing. The ropes are an essential element in many compositions, Knockdown (1974), being a good example. He wrote: ‘In composition it is equally important to know what to leave out as well as what to put in… I like to imply a situation rather than state the obvious… I have found it possible, for example, to suggest the tension of a boxing contest with only one of the boxers showing in the picture.’ His figures are well grounded, with inner tension and movement, but a surprising number seem to have the thin arms and legs of adolescents, rather than the robust physique normally associated with pugilists. This seems to be confirmed by one of the works in the Ben Uri show, dated 1952, entitled At the Salford Sporting Club (Pl 1). Rabin won the drawing prize at the 1969 and 1977 International Biennale of Sport in Fine Art.
1 At the Salford Sporting Club by Sam Rabin (1903–1991), 1952
Although Crow’s book is based on a 2010 dissertation, no information is forthcoming about its context. Scholarly apparatus, such as footnotes, or dimensions and locations of works are lacking (all works are small), but there is a useful biographical chronology of Rabin, and biographical notes on the major teachers and friends. The book is well illustrated, with works of art, and evocative photographs, and it does contain new factual material.
The British Museum and the Government Art Collection hold some of his work, but none is on permanent display in a public collection. The Ben Uri exhibition offered a rare opportunity to see Rabin’s work (Pl 2).
2 Green Shorts by Sam Rabin (1903–1991)