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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2024
Introduction
Born in London to a German Jewish family, Edmond Xavier Kapp was a British portrait painter and caricaturist, brother of the artist Helen Kapp (1902–78), and well known for his depictions of famous politicians and musicians of the day. At Cambridge, where he studied Medieval and Modern Languages, his caricatures started to be published in magazines such as Granta, and a one-man exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum swiftly followed. After Cambridge he set up a successful small studio in 1912, producing caricatures for a variety of publications.
After serving in World War One as a lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment, and later working in Intelligence, his reputation as an artist continued to grow, with a variety of exhibitions both in the UK and abroad, as well as a number of books of his drawings and caricatures, including a series of lithographs of diplomats at the League of Nations produced for both the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
Kapp was married to his first wife, the writer and activist Yvonne Mayer (1903–99) from 1922 to 1930. He married his second wife, the Russian artist Polia Chentoff (1896–1933) in 1932, but she sadly died of a cerebral tumour the following year. Kapp was commissioned as an official war artist in World War Two, and his series of drawings, ‘Life under London’, depicting people sheltering in the London Underground and in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields during the Blitz, became particularly well known. There was a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961, following which Kapp embraced abstract painting. His work is held in several important British collections, notably the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Barber Institute in Birmingham.
It is clear from KM’s letter below that Kapp was offering a caricature of the celebrated conductor Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944) for publication in Rhythm, and indeed, his ‘Sir Henry Wood. An Impression’ appeared in the January 1913 issue.
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