National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | George.W.Lambert Retrospective

Chesham Street is one of a group of ‘puzzle pictures’ that Lambert painted between 1910 and 1914. These paintings appear to have a meaning and yet are not strictly narrative; they invite the viewer to provide their own interpretation.

This is a bravura work that demonstrates Lambert’s considerable technical prowess but, more than this, it is a challenging and demanding image which asks ‘who is this man and what is going on?’. The man sits boldly in front of the viewer, holding up his shirt and revealing his entire torso. His head is held high, his lips are closed and he looks down at the viewer. His pale flesh, with the play of light on it, gleams against the dark surroundings. Lambert’s friend Hardy Wilson names ‘Williams, Lambert’s model’ as the source for the patient being sounded by a medical man (Wilson 1930, p.93) and Thea Proctor stated that it was the same model, once a sailor, who posed for the king in The shop(Thomas 1962). However, the features of the half-clad man resemble those of Lambert, and it is probable that Lambert intended to suggest a self-image (using the model’s body for the torso).

The picture has been read narratively as a scene in a consulting room with a doctor examining the heart or lungs of his patient. Although Lambert does depict such a scene, this is not the subject of the painting, but the excuse for the composition. Dramatically, the painting is not about a physical examination at a specialist’s room in Chesham Street, London, but rather the psychological intrusiveness of that process. In 1901, Freud published his Psychopathology of everyday life and, during the decade, his ideas about exploring the psyche gained wider understanding. This man seems to have nothing to hide, to be literally and metaphorically baring his chest, exposing his heart and soul to the world.

Contemporary critics in Britain, such as P.G. Konody in the Observer on 27 May 1910, acknowledged the ‘truly masterly painting of a male form’. When the painting was later exhibited in Australia, Lambert’s friends also recognised that the subject provided a splendid opportunity for the presentation of nudity. But this is not strictly a male nude. The figure is not naked; he is half clothed and is intentionally shown in this way to give the image greater impact and to make it more sexually charged.

Lambert also had a technical concern in painting this work: he used the subject as an opportunity to depict the male torso using a monochromatic approach, with the play of light on the pale surface of the skin contrasted against the shaded head

In Lotty and a lady , Lambert presented an apparently everyday kitchen scene in which the housemaid, Lotty, is in command of her kitchen, looking out comfortably at the viewer. The lady, with head in profile and dressed for outdoors in hat and gloves, occupies the upper left of the scene. On the table is a carefully arranged still life with two fish, observed with precision. Neither mistress nor maid engage with these objects. They are lost in thought, posed as the still life.

The model for the lady was Thea Proctor. The model for ‘Lotty’ was Lottie Stafford, a Cockney washerwoman living in the slum cottages of Paradise Walk in Chelsea. She was a popular model on account of her naturalness, total self-assurance and subtle sensuality. She had a ‘swan neck’ which greatly appealed to William Orpen, and which he emphasised in the series of works he painted around 1905 – including The wash house 1905 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) – that deal with working-class themes. Lottie also posed for British artists William Nicholson and Walter Sickert.

Lambert painted the work with assured brushstrokes in a restricted palette. He used broader paintwork for the main elements of the picture, with some remarkable crisp flicks of paint, and a more detailed and delicate handling for his depiction of the fish and other still-life details in the foreground.

Lambert’s painterly approach and careful design reflects his desire to paint in the manner of Velázquez, and the image resembles Velázquez’s Kitchen scene with Christ in the house of Martha and Mary 1618 (National Gallery, London). As in a number of Velázquez’s works the viewpoints are organised so that we see the table and the objects from above while looking directly at the figures. But Lambert also suggested that he could not have painted Lotty’s head had he ‘not been so impressed by the work of Manet’ (ML MSS A1811, p.72).

This apparently straightforward genre scene may also have symbolic significance. Lambert may have intended to depict one of the themes of Velázquez’s painting, the contemplative versus the active life, with the lady representing the contemplative or leisurely life and Lotty the world of work, necessary for the contemplative life. Lambert may also be presenting two aspects of one woman, the elegant public face as opposed to the domestic private self.

Further, this painting may also be a comment on class relations. By portraying a housemaid sitting in the kitchen together with the mistress of the house, Lambert challenged traditional Edwardian social roles and behaviours. At this time servants were urged to make themselves invisible when in the presence of their employers, and to this extent the scene is stage-managed. Lotty is posed in a subversive manner with her hand defiantly on her hip, and she wears earrings, something that might be considered unusual for a servant girl. The subject is similar to those of several of Lambert's Bulletin illustrations in which he portrayed a mistress with a confident servant – with the servant usually getting the better of her mistress.

The painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria at the insistence of Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, a gallery trustee, from its exhibition at the Guild Hall, Melbourne, in 1910. It was the first of Lambert's European paintings to be purchased for an Australian public collection, and the only one to be purchased while he lived abroad.

Who are these important people? Lambert presented a group of ordinary people at a time when the subjects of group portraits were often people with wealth or status in society. He mocked the assumption that importance is a matter of money or property. He created an allegorical image representing a range of qualities that are possessed by people in the world: motherhood and the new life and energy of future generations; physical prowess and the fighting forces of the world; business and administrative acumen; and the ongoing activities of the world, represented by the red cartwheel.

Lambert’s portrayal of these working people and his strong characterisation appealed to his contemporaries, but they found it an enigma; they were puzzled about the subject and how the oddly assorted group of figures fitted together into one scene. They considered it to be a most incongruous group, made more so by being grouped in front of a cart above the sea. They would have preferred a more literal story to Lambert’s allegorical one. The Observer critic, P.G. Konody, suggested on 26 April 1914 that ‘one could accept it as a triumphant assertion of the theory that it does not matter what a picture represents, so long as it be well painted’.

The Daily Express critic observed on 16 April 1914 that the flower girl

has her momentary importance since the advent of Eliza Doolittle and her ‘horrible language’; the prize fighter has as big a public following as the musical comedy ‘star’; and on the importance of babies Blue-books and Royal Commissions galore have often insisted.

The reviewer proceeded to ask of the gentleman with the top hat in Lambert’s painting, ‘is he a stockbroker’ or ‘merely a professor of phonetics?’. In his most famous play, Pygmalion (1912), George Bernard Shaw made fun of social snobbery and the way people judged others according to class. Important people was not an illustration of Shaw’s writing, but it was a variation on his socialist ideas, showing a flower girl and a prize-fighter posing with the authority of eminent citizens.

The woman who initially posed for the mother, flower girl or costermonger was a professional model, a young unmarried mother from Battersea whose baby, shown in the rush basket, died while the painting was in progress. (Lambert reworked the head a year later, using another model, Eunice Graham; see the drawing, cat.56.) The model for the boy was a boxer, Albert Broadrib, who was training for his first fight and who Amy Lambert said arrived ‘escorted by a bodyguard of one or more trainers, who watched over his feeding and smoking’ (Lambert 1938, p.55). The model for the businessman was William Marchant, the head of Goupil Gallery, a man of great charm and affability who had retired to Hove but travelled to London for the sittings. Lambert made several pencil sketches for various figures in the group. The signature with the inscription ‘Chelsea/Sydney’ indicates that he reworked the painting again in the second part of 1921.

Lambert commented that although ‘many people think this picture was influenced by certain movements which were going on in London’ his approach was more influenced by the Italian primitives and Botticelli. It was a ‘desire to create a picture which would look good in any light ... It was the working within a fixed limitation, a little span of which Puvis was so proud ... It was the beginning ... of a reverence of rule, of order’ (ML MSS A1811, p.76). It was a decorative composition, a concern with the arrangement of shapes. To this end Lambert deliberately flattened the forms, placing an emphasis on line and strong design. He intentionally used a high-key, pastel palette and created a dry, chalky texture for his paint, ‘working wax and turpentine into his paint to do away with shininess and the unevenness of surface’ (Lambert 1924, p.15). He drew with pencil into his paint to outline the figures.

Lambert’s decorative and colourful arrangement of figures in fixed poses, nonetheless, resembles those in the paintings of Eric Kennington, William Strang and other British realists with whom Lambert exhibited. Important people was shown in 1914 alongside Kennington’s Costermongers , and the reviewer for the Daily Mail , 24 April 1914, described these paintings as ‘huge staring groups of life-size people, represented in a brutal airless way, though with a great deal of technical cleverness’, and acknowledged that they were protests against the ‘namby-pambiness’ of the usual group compositions.

When exhibited at the International Society’s 1914 exhibition, Important people was a succès de scandale. It received greater critical attention than any of Lambert’s previous works, with the reviewer from the Daily Express suggesting on 16 April 1914 that the painting would ‘provide dinner-table discussion for the next fortnight’.

Although highly admired and greatly controversial during his lifetime, this painting was still owned by Lambert at the time of his death. The Australian critic Basil Burdett wrote that ‘Important People assumed its place unchallenged as the most complete pictorial essay’ in Lambert’s memorial exhibition, and went further to suggest that it was ‘perhaps the most important pictorial conception achieved by Lambert’

Australian printmaker, designer, painter and teacher Thea Proctor (1879–1966) was significant in Lambert’s life as a friend, colleague and model. She studied with Julian Ashton in Sydney where Lambert was a fellow student. Chaperoned by her mother, she arrived in England in the summer of 1903 and sat for Lambert during the autumn in his studio flat at Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Road, Holland Park, London (AGNSWQ 1962). For this portrait Proctor wore her customary summer outfit for 1903, a softly flowing dark-blue-purple polka-dot dress, the pouched front a special feature of the time, together with a wide-brimmed hat. Throughout her life, Proctor presented herself as a woman who was aware of what was stylish, while adapting current trends to her own highly personal sense of elegance.

Lambert arranged his twenty-three-year-old sitter with an imaginary landscape behind her in the manner of earlier artists such as Thomas Gainsborough. He also worked in the tradition of the prominent society portrait painter, Charles Furse, who created a vogue for airy outdoor portraits. Like Furse, Lambert used fluid paint and superimposed dark shapes against light. He gave Proctor a sophisticated elegance by elongating her neck, torso and limbs. In his modelling of paint he suggested the tactile sensuousness of the skin and fabric he depicted. The languorous, rhythmical forms are in harmony with the rounded shapes of Proctor’s face and the sleeves of her dress.

In the landscape behind Proctor Lambert depicted two hounds pursuing a white stag or a unicorn (a fabled creature symbolic of virginity). This small detail provides two possible, divergent, interpretations of the painting. If it is a stag, this could refer to the Greek myth of Artemis, goddess of abundance, fertility, hunting and longevity, who was furious when she discovered the mortal hunter Acteon watching her naked. As a punishment, she turned him into a stag and set his hounds upon him to tear him apart. If the animal is a unicorn it could refer to the maiden in the Hunt of the unicorn tapestries (The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), who tames the unicorn with her charms after huntsmen and hounds pursue the animal and bring it to bay.

In painting this portrait Lambert may also have been influenced by two (or three) remarkable works that he saw in the National Gallery when he first arrived in London: Rubens’s Le chapeau de paille c.1625 and Hogarth’s The shrimp girl c.1745. At this time Lambert suggested that Hogarth’s painting ‘fairly carried [him] off his feet’ (ML MSS A1811, pp.55–6). In his treatise, The analysis of beauty , Hogarth recommended the essence of beauty lies in the ‘line of grace’, or ‘line of beauty’, against the straight lines of academic classicism. This florid, ‘serpentine line’, was the fluid aesthetic that Lambert adopted at this time, and especially in this portrait. Like Rubens, Lambert painted his subject in a pose of modesty with a sideways glance. But unlike that of Susannah Fourment (Rubens’s subject in Le chapeau de paille ), Proctor’s bosom is not openly displayed, but fully clothed, perhaps to reinforce this modesty. Lambert was not by any means the first to refer to Rubens’s painting in his own, and he may also have been referencing the work of the most famous female painter of the eighteenth century, Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, and her Self-portrait in a straw hat c.1782 (National Gallery, London), painted in free imitation of Rubens’s work.

This was the first painting which Lambert exhibited at the Royal Academy (in 1904), where it was prominently hung. For many years it remained in the possession of the Lamberts. Amy Lambert gave it to the sitter in 1946.

Recumbent figure of a soldier is a starkly simple, natural image of a typical Australian digger. Lambert portrayed this soldier with a bullet hole in his left breast, his right arm reaching towards this wound as if to still the pain, and through his frowning brow capturing the soldier’s last spasm. Particular attention is given to the accuracy of the uniform: there is caked mud on the puttees and the soles of the boots are shown as being slightly worn.

In this sculpture, Lambert commented on the human condition, creating a peaceful vision of death by showing the soldier looking ‘through closed eye lids at something he can no more understand than you & I can understand’(ML MSS 97/3, p.105). On viewing the plaster the Sydney Morning Herald ’s critic was struck by the natural expression on the soldier’s face and observed on 29 June 1929 that the figure had a ‘smile of peace’ and read it as ‘satisfaction at a duty nobly done’. The soldier’s calm appearance led the Sydney Morning Herald ’s commentator to remark on 7 March 1931 that ‘death in war would be beautiful if it only came thus’.

The soldier’s long, lean body was typical of the Light Horsemen in Palestine; his face was, as Lambert suggested ‘Australian yet handsome’ (ML MSS 97/3, p.105), and as the Sydney Morning Herald ’s commentator perceptively observed on 7 March 1931, like those on the Sydney beaches.

During the war a number of artists portrayed their fellow soldiers as rough and awkward, but by the end of the war artists began to create heroic images in which the Anzacs were ennobled and portrayed as bronzed heroes. Lambert’s soldier is in this tradition: he is an idealised national champion who was part of contemporary cultural attitudes and values and who became an integral part of the Australian identity.

Lambert received his commission to make ‘one bronze recumbent figure of Soldier life size’ from the Roman Catholic Sailors and Soldiers on 19 April 1928 – for £1200 (ML MSS 97/7, item 28). He had made several pencil studies for the figure then, once the commission was confirmed, made a full-size plaster figure cast from clay. His assistant Sten Snekker was the model. Snekker and the clothed plaster figure then lay on two benches, side by side, while Lambert explored minor variations in the dress on the plaster figure. From this Lambert moulded a second clay model on a third bench. He asked Murch to assist him in modelling the figure, and gave Murch credit for this by asking him to co-sign the sculpture.

Lambert held a private view of the plaster in June 1929, before it was sent to London for casting into bronze. The final work was unveiled at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, by Archbishop Kelly on 26 July 1931, after Lambert’s death.

As Australia did not have an official tomb of the unknown soldier until 1993, Lambert’s recumbent figure came to be known informally as Australia’s ‘Monument to the unknown soldier’.

On 25 April 1915 Australian and New Zealand troops landed on Gallipoli at dawn. It was one of two main assaults on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Anzacs were to land near the promontory of Gaba Tepe, about halfway up the peninsula, while British forces landed at Cape Helles, at its southern tip. The two forces were to converge on the central mass of the Kilid Bahr Plateau, which dominated the Dardanelles Strait. The Anzac troops had expected open country, but instead were confronted with steep, scrub-covered heights, and climbed the precipitous cliffs under Turkish gunfire.

Lambert depicted the landing at the moment when the Australian troops were climbing the steep, rocky hillside. He showed the hugeness of the landscape and the smallness of the men. He portrayed many of the soldiers as dead, or falling, with puffs of smoke in the sky. He wrote:

visitors to the Museum ... complain there is a lack of fire, a lack of action and of the terror of war, but on the facts ... we must accept that men equipped as these men were, moving upwards on this particular place, without any idea of where the enemy was, what they had to do, would look just like this small swarm of ants climbing, no matter how rapidly, climbing painfully and laboriously upward through the uneven ground and spiky uncomfortable shrubs (ML MSS A1811, p.75).

Lambert portrayed the scene looking up at the cliffs and the mass of soldiers clambering up them, a different perspective from the majority of interpretations of this event, such as Charles Dixon’s The landing at Anzac, 25 April 1915 (Archives, New Zealand) which showed the scene from above with the men climbing out of boats and wading ashore. By adopting this viewpoint Lambert made the seemingly inaccessible heights seem as much the enemy as the Turkish forces. Through his massive canvas, the harsh jagged outline of the cliff and the dark brown mass of the terrain silhouetted against a strident yellowed sky, Lambert conveyed the psychological impact of climbing these slopes. He helped viewers realise the endurance of the soldiers clambering upwards. Through his use of colour and abstract forms, he evoked the emotion of the occasion. And he showed the soldiers as small, faceless figures to create a visual metaphor for the scant regard in which these Australians’ lives were held by those in charge of the campaign.

Lambert obtained facts about the landing from the Australian official historian C.E.W. Bean and other members of the Australian Historical Mission during his visit to Gallipoli in February–March 1919. At that time he painted oil sketches of the terrain at Gallipoli. Back in his London studio he made pencil studies of his models, dressed in uniform, as if climbing a steep cliff. From these, and from his oil sketches made on site, Lambert prepared a pencil design of the composition and a rough oil sketch. His son Maurice, an aspiring sculpture student, assisted his father by preparing the canvas and transferring the design onto it from Lambert’s composition drawing. The canvas, advanced this far, was rolled up and shipped out to Australia in February 1921. In Australia, Lambert was assisted by Louis McCubbin, who helped by under-painting the sky, which Lambert worked over afterwards. McCubbin’s assistance was of a mechanical kind, and not visible on the surface of the painting.

Alexander Colquhoun reviewed the painting in the Melbourne Herald on 4 May 1922. He wrote:

This is not a pretty picture, nor a cheerful one, and there is an uncanny lack of anything individual or personal in the scrambling, crawling, khaki figures scarcely discernible against the rocky precipitous ground. It speaks, however, as a declaration of sacrifice and achievement in a way that no other war picture has done.

Colquhoun understood that by representing these Australians climbing this specific cliff, Lambert conveyed the universal experience of people overcoming obstacles.

The painting was commissioned by the Australian government through the Australian High Commission in London in 1919, for £500, as part of the official war art scheme. Lambert began the painting in London and completed it in Sydney for the opening exhibition of the Australian War Museum, Melbourne, on Anzac Day 25 April 1922.

The squatter’s daughter created a stir in Australia when it was first exhibited in 1924 because Lambert was concerned with creating a new way of painting Australian landscape. He assimilated the blue-and-gold palette that Streeton had used to convey the heat and glare of the Australian scene, but he moved from an intuitive response to the land to a more formalist approach. He counterbalanced the strong verticals of the trees with the triangular shape of the hill and the horizontal streak of green grass in the lower centre of the picture. He painted with tight, controlled brushstrokes, so the image seems still, but lifelike, with the trees and grass embalmed by a sharp, scintillating light. He observed in around 1927 that ‘when the Apple gum gilded by the dying sun comes up for technical analysis, the memories of Giorgione’s famous tree ... make it look more beautiful’ (ML MSS 97/8, item 5).

The illusionism of the scene encourages us to look at it as an image of a particular person in a specific place at a certain time – as a picture of Gwendoline ‘Dee’ Ryrie in white shirt and jodhpurs leading her horse (which Lambert had given her) across the family property, Micalago, during the Christmas and New Year of 1923–24.

Lambert’s prime interest, however, in The squatter’s daughter was in conveying a universal squatter’s daughter. He gave it a generic title rather than the specific ‘Gwendoline Ryrie at Micalago’ , to indicate that it was an image of Australian life.

Lambert attacked the intuitive approach to landscape and, in response, critics such as Howard Ashton maintained that Lambert’s work lacked emotion. But this was his aim. He advised young landscape painters that there was always perfect design in nature and that they should reduce it to definite forms, as he had simplified the mass of the hill and sharpened its outline in The squatter’s daughter .

He portrayed the figure of the squatter’s daughter as if she were located artificially in her environment, as if she were a cut-out shape pasted onto it. He described her as passing ‘gracefully across the foreground’ and looking ‘like a figure on a Greek vase’ (ML MSS 97/8, item 5), indicating that he purposely presented her in profile in an arranged pose and detached from her setting. He intentionally created a stylised view.

That the girl is not immersed in the landscape (as in A bush idyll c.1896, cat.3), but merely passes across the land, is appropriate. By the 1920s many Australian landowners did not need to work their properties themselves but were able to employ others to do so, and a number of city dwellers had the time and money to visit the rural areas for their health and for recreation. The squatter’s daughter reflects this new relationship of Australians with the land.

Lambert’s formalist response in this paintinginspired other painters. Hans Heysen wrote on 20 August 1924 that it was ‘different from anything else painted in Australia’ (ML MSS 285/87), and in 1930 that it was a picture which ‘in its search for character and form’, was ‘an object lesson for the young landscape painters of Australia’ (Lambert 1930). In 1931, Lionel Lindsay commented:

When the ‘Squatter’s Daughter’ was first shown, to the best of my knowledge, only three Australian artists proclaimed its originality and truth. Such a break with suave sentiment and surface drawing met with a protective opposition – here was almost attack upon established income. It was pronounced hard, untrue, unsympathetic. To-day we know this landscape to possess the largest local truth, supreme draughtsmanship and design, and to exhale the very spirit of Australia (AA 1931).

As a result of Lambert’s example and his denunciation of the sentimental Australian landscape, artists began to make changes in their work. They came to believe that they should now explore organic form, seek greater simplicity and use sharper contours.

Lambert thought highly of The squatter’s daughter , asking 500 guineas for it at a time when he received only £500 for his most significant battle painting, The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek 1924 (cat.95), on which he worked for several years. Lambert sold The squatter’s daughter to George Pitt-Rivers in England in 1926.

Henry Lawson had published a poem called ‘The squatter’s daughter’ in 1889, of which Lambert no doubt was aware. It related the story of a wealthy squatter who encouraged his daughter to become engaged to a wealthy lordling; however, she elopes with a stockman instead. Eventually the father becomes reconciled with the daughter and son-in-law.

In 1910 a silent film was produced, based on a 1907 stage melodrama with the same title and same cast. It was written by Edmund Duggan and Bert Bailey. In 1933 The squatter’s daughter , a sound film, featured a strong young horsewoman in jodhpurs who saves the family property.

In Self-portrait with gladioli Lambert deliberately depicted himself as a precious, self-assured aesthete. In this, he visualised the thoughts expressed in a letter to Amy on 25 November 1921:

I am a luxury, a hot house rarity ... Scoffed at for preciousness. Despised for resembling a chippendale chair in a country where timber is cheap (ML MSS 97/10, p.379).

He was a dedicated artist who worked to the point of exhaustion, but he portrayed himself, not as he was, but as the affected, self-admiring dandy he thought others considered him to be.

To paint himself thus required, as the critic for the Australasian newspaper suggested on 24 February 1923, ‘courage, self-analysis and amazing technical skill’. His gaze is quizzical; he placed himself under self-scrutiny. He stood in an apparently careless attitude, but studiously posed, with his hands splayed out and showing ‘articulations of nerve and sinew’.

Lambert was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy on 23 November 1922 – the only Australian painter ever to be so honoured. This self-portrait might be viewed as Lambert’s statement of achievement. He stands smiling, in his artistic brown velvet gown, with a purple scarf around his neck and a vase of gladioli before him, like someone who has just received a medal on a ribbon and a bouquet of flowers. In other self-portraits such as Self-portrait c.1907 (cat.37) he depicted himself with a paintbrush in hand, but here he showed himself posing. Lambert’s stance in this portrait resembles that of the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Self-portrait c.1780 (Royal Academy, London), in which, dressed in his academic robes, he stands aristocratically with his right hand on his hip (although not with his left arm raised). Lambert’s pose could also be viewed as a witty adaptation of the classical marble sculpture, the Hermes Logios , an image of the god of eloquence, who, like Lambert in this portrait, stands with one arm raised, as if speaking.

Gladioli are the birth flower of those born between 22 August and 22 September, as Lambert was. Gladiolus is derived from the Latin word gladius , meaning sword, on account of the shape of its leaves, which look like a two-edged sword; gladioli are sometimes known as sword lilies. In Roman times the flowers were presented to victorious gladiators. The flower is thus a symbol for victory. It can also symbolise strength of character.

But in addition to being a portrait of achievement and victory, this painting is also a portrait of jest, of self-mockery. It is an image which brings to mind the lines in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881), which caricature the aesthete:

Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand. And every one will say, As you walk your flowery way, ‘If he’s content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me, Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!’

In his Self-portrait with gladioli Lambert presented himself in his velvet gown with tongue in cheek. He showed himself with not one poppy or lily, but a whole bunch of gladioli to show ‘how he ranked as an apostle in the high aesthetic band’. As much as suggesting Lambert’s arrogance, it indicates his sense of humour and his delight in creating conceits.

Some of his former colleagues (like Hardy Wilson), perhaps jealously, thought he had became enamoured of praise, and they no doubt considered this portrait to be a true expression of his being. C.R. Bradish described him in Table Talk, 14 July 1927, as being ‘tricked out in brocade’, ‘strutting bloated with its whole consequence’, but then asked ‘why should not George Lambert be vain?’. ‘His precision as a painter, his occasional magnificence as a draughtsman … entitle him to stand among Australian painters wearing a crown of gold feathers if he feels that way’. However, not everyone maintained Lambert was lordly: the Sydney Mail reported on 13 September 1922 that he scorned any reference to ‘artistic genius’, and that he preferred ‘to be told by a critic that he had “done his job well,” as one might address a bricklayer’.

Self-portrait with gladioli was purchased in Adelaide, in 1923 by a private collector, T.E. Barr-Smith, at its first exhibition (‘Lambert and Heysen: An exhibition of portraiture, still life, and landscape’, at Preece’s Gallery). The price, £1000, was the highest paid for a work by Lambert during his life. It was not publicly shown again until Lambert’s memorial loan exhibition in Sydney in 1930, although it was widely known through its reproduction as a frontispiece in The art of George W. Lambert, published in 1924.

Lambert’s best-known bush image, Across the blac k soil plains was inspired by his memories of horse teams hauling heavily laden wool wagons across the bare, miry, flat lands of Snakes Plain from Warren to the railway station at Nevertire. He encountered this landscape while droving sheep in the 1890s and was reminded of it during a visit to Warren in 1899. Lambert suggested that Jim Smith, a known identity of the district, was the model for the teamster walking beside the wool wagon and urging the horses onwards (ML MSS A1811, p.54). It has also been claimed that the teamster was Luke Rollins from Moree, and Henry Sharkey, who carried a record load from Louth to Bourke.

By portraying the rhythmic rise and fall of the horses’ heads and the tilt of the wagon, Lambert created a sense of movement in his image. The horses strain as they pull the load through the mud which sticks to their hoofs like glue, with the leader leaning into the chains to pull others into line. He dramatised the scene by placing the horses in silhouette against the sky and using the chiaroscuro of light and dark, showing the light making its way through the billowing clouds and illuminating the horses’ backs. In adopting a low viewpoint Lambert also made the team dominate the image. Apart from the blue in the sky the painting is a harmony of tonally balanced browns, beiges and white.

Placing the large canvas diagonally across the garden shed or washhouse at his mother’s home in the Sydney suburb of Hornsby, Lambert began to work on it. He had made colour notes of the landscape, as well as sketches of Jim Smith’s team of horses while staying at Meryon in about 1895–6 (ML MSS A1811, p.17). He commented that:

As a boy in the bush I did much work with draft [sic] horses ... [One] called Barney had such fine action and such imposing carriage ... and possibly what knowledge I displayed in connection with horses in ‘Black Soil Plains’ originated with my association with this exceptionally fine animal (ML MSS A1811, pp.54–5).

He later scoured the area around his mother’s home for further models for the horses, and for each one in the team he made two or three oil studies (ML MSS A1811, pp.54–5).

The painting echoes the spirit of a poem by the Scottish–Australian narrative poet and horseman, Will Ogilvie, ‘How the Fire Queen crossed the swamp’. This poem, published in Ogilivie’s first collection, Fair girls and gray horses (Sydney, 1898), included the lines:

With straining muscles and tightened chains – sixteen pulling like one; With jingling harness and droning wheels and bare hoofs’ rhythmic tramp, With creaking timbers and lurching load the Fire Queen faced the swamp!

Across the black soil plains inspired other poems such as ‘Across the black soil plains’ by ‘Mousquetaire’ (Gordon Tidy), which was published in the Bulletin , 30 October 1902 and was illustrated by Lambert’s painting.

O nobly manned must be the land, and nobly horsed as well, Has such a sight as this to show, such story has to tell, The teamster who so sternly strides, the team so strongly strains Till stride and strength be come at length across the Black Soil Plains

The picture received an enthusiastic response from contemporary critics. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote on 18 August 1899 ‘In this long narrow canvas the young artist paints with astonishing vigour and sense of movement ... in every conceivable attitude the horses tug and strain at the heavy load.’ It was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the New South Wales Society of Artists exhibition in 1899 and was subsequently awarded the 1899 Wynne Prize for landscape painting.

More critical of his own work than many others, Lambert wrotein the Australian Magazine , 18 September 1899:

It is strong, ‘masculine’ if you like; the horses are well drawn and painted, the movement and action are ‘all there,’ the teamster (and his dog) are realistic, the sky is good, the colour is harmonious, the subject is popular, and the picture has been purchased for the National Art Gallery – what more can we say? This: that when G.W. Lambert has studied and worked hard for a few more years, both here and abroad (as we hope he will) – well, then he may paint the ‘picture of the year’.

The painting inspired variations in other media such as Tom Woodman’s glass painting Load of wool 1940, at the Carinda Hotel, New South Wales, as well as a plaster version.

About 1855 Edward Roper painted a landscape entitled Bringing down the wool from a Murray station (National Library of Australia, Canberra), which included a bullock team with a load of wool. Frank Mahony also treated the subject of a wool wagon several times. These images have none of the action or drama of Lambert’s painting, nor the spirit of place. Out of the particular and the personal Lambert created an enduring icon conveying the toil of man and horse and their relationship with the land.