Branded an “enemy alien” upon his arrival in Britain, Kurt Schwitters was held in an Isle of Man internment camp from July 1940 until November 1941 but was still able to continue his work as an artist thanks to the support of camp commander and art enthusiast Captain H. O. Daniel. His productivity was astounding, both in terms of quantity and diversity of style. Due to a lack of conventional malleable materials, he turned to other resources in making his art. Schwitters crafted sculptures out of porridge and pieced together collages using refuse. He also wrote short stories, made drawings and painted - mostly in a realist style but with a number of abstract works. The sales of his Norwegian landscapes, which he painted from memory, and above all the made-to-order portraits he created of his fellow detainees, served as a modest source of income for the artist.

Among those who posed for Schwitters’ portraits were a string of prominent German and Austrian artists who had fled the Nazi regime. The Austrian sculptor Siegfried Charoux can be seen here. He arrived in England in 1935 and was held in an internment camp for two months in 1940. Only a small number of Schwitters’ estimated 250 art works from this period have survived. Many paintings were destroyed by a fire in the Hutchinson internment camp, while his porridge sculptures could not be preserved.