Alfred Rubens, F.R.I.C.S.

Alfred Rubens was born in 1903, the youngest son of an estate agent and minor property developer, and brought up in Highbury, north London. He attended the City of London School but had to leave at the age of fourteen when his father died suddenly. His eldest brother was fighting in the trenches and the second brother was about to be called up, leaving only Alfred to help his mother run the family business. He read avidly and studied in his spare time, qualifying as a chartered surveyor, but to his lifelong regret he never went to university. When his elder brother was demobilised, they formed the partnership of H I and A Rubens, Chartered Surveyors, and developed commercial property through their own investment corporation from which they both made a fortune. Rubens began to collect prints and drawings of Jewish interest in the 1920s and gradually built up an internationally important collection. When the Jewish Museum was founded in 1932, in one large room in Woburn House, an office block in Tavistock Square, he was invited to join its committee to advise on prints and drawings and thereafter he spent much time, enthusiasm and money on the museum’s development. He donated miniatures, paintings and prints, as well as display cases, and commissioned the writing and publication of the guidebook and illustrated catalogue, a work of rare scholarship now out of print. In 1935 Rubens published his first book, Anglo-Jewish Portraits, at his own expense, followed in 1954 by A Jewish Iconography and, in 1967, A History of Jewish Costume. He contributed papers to the Jewish Historical Society of England and was elected its president in 1956 and 1957 and in the following year he accepted the chairmanship of the Jewish Museum. Rubens managed its affairs for a quarter of a century, retiring in 1983 when he was eighty. During his period of office the first professionally trained curator was appointed and Rubens made good the museum’s annual deficit from his own pocket for some five years after the Jewish Memorial Council withdrew its funding in 1980. Apart from his own generosity Rubens’greatest service to the museum was, perhaps, securing the very active support of Raymond Burton, former chairman of the Burton Group.Burton recognized the museum’s importance as an educational centre and through his influence the trustees were able to move into a listed building in Camden Town with purpose-designed galleries. The gallery for ceremonial art was appropriately named the Alfred Rubens Gallery. Rubens himself was responsible for fitting out the print gallery to which he bequeathed his superb collection of more than 2,000 prints and drawings. He died on 1 June 1998, shortly before his 95th birthday, when the Museum dedicated a special exhibition of Jewish costume, alongside a selection of his prints, in his memory.