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

The British writer Helen de Vere Beauclerk (1892–1969) was born Helen Mary Dorothea Bellingham. Her father, a major in the army, died in India a year after her birth, and she was adopted by a close family friend, Major Ferdinand de Vere Beauclerk. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and for a short time earned her living teaching music and accompanying on the piano. She returned to England at the outbreak of the First World War. She became a close friend of the artist Edmund Dulac and, after he separated from his wife, lived with him from 1924 until his death in 1953. Dulac frequently used her as a model for his illustrations, and illustrated her two novels, The green lacquer pavilion (1926) and The love of the foolish angel (1929). She also wrote Mountain and the tree (1935) and Shadows on the wall (1941) and translated into English work by Colette. She was tall and slender with a long neck, and dressed simply and elegantly.

Lambert captured Helen Beauclerk’s face brilliantly, suggesting the pulsating life under her skin. He reminded viewers of her physicality by showing her putting on her gloves, one bare hand stroking down a gloved index finger on the other hand. At the time that he painted this portrait Lambert began to emphasise the hands of his sitters, which he invested with a degree of nervous energy, as he did in this painting.

As well as creating a likeness of his fascinating subject, Lambert was interested in the beauty and texture of the whole of his paint surface. The background is thinly painted in expressive dabs in many colours, including chrome yellow, blue, purple and black.

Contemporary critics appreciated the abstract, decorative qualities of this painting, as much as its likeness. The Observer critic, P.G. Konody, noted on 17 June 1917, ‘These portraits are convincing and full of character; but the interest aroused by the life-like representation is never allowed to distract attention from the more abstract qualities of the work’.

The portrait was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales when first exhibited in Australia at the Fine Art Society in 1921. It was their first purchase of Lambert’s work since the 1890s.

This is a lively bravura portrait of a modern Melbourne woman of fashion, style and elegance. It has an arresting vitality. Her belongings, a luscious blue stole, elegant feathered hat and jewelled ring, are as much the subject of this work as is Miss Collins herself, and contribute to it a sense of opulence. Her flamboyant pose, with her head slightly tilted back and poised to one side, and her arms caught in mid-action, matches her vivacious personality. Her eyes appear to be laughing in accord with her smile and she seems to be deliberately posing or hamming it up for the artist.

The subject, Miss Gladys Neville Collins, was the daughter of J.T. Collins, lawyer, Victorian State Parliamentary draughtsman, and trustee of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria. Lambert appears to have enjoyed painting her portrait and described her to Amy on 10 December 1921 as ‘a dear girl [who] sits for the fun of it and because her Dad thinks I am it’ (ML MSS 97/10, p.393).

Lambert portrayed the individual features of Miss Collins but, with her collaboration, he arranged them to denote a characteristic type. Miss Collins’s tilted head, her half-open mouth, half-closed eyes, and almost-bare right arm suggest an individual sensuality, but they also indicate a form of codified (sexual) behaviour. Lambert's portrait presents a witty version of the pose of Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa 1645–52 (Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome), an established expression of the ecstatic experience, and one which was subsequently taken up by photographers, film-makers and advertisers.

What is more, Lambert presented Miss Collins in a variation of the pose used by Joshua Reynolds in his portrait Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse 1784, which in 1921 (the year Lambert painted this portrait) the Duke of Westminster had controversially sold to The Huntington Library and Art Collection in California. By associating Miss Collins with this classic image of a leading actress, he hinted that she was playing a role in this portrait. It is also possible that Lambert knew Sargent’s Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: a vele gonfie of 1905 (Tate, London), a lively portrait of Ena wearing as a joke a black feathered hat and billowing cloak, painted essentially in black and white. It is similar to Lambert’s painting in its sense of extravagant posture and light-heartedness. If nothing else, both paintings are a reflection of the spirit of the times.

In this portrait Lambert used a limited range of colours to great effect: a dark Manet black and a Gainsborough blue, with the addition of purple in the jewel on a chain around her neck. Lambert paid close attention to the clothing, capturing an array of textures – the lustrous steel-blue silk of her stole, the fluffy white fur collar, the white leather gloves, the transparent black lace sleeve and the black velvet of the hat wreathed with white ostrich plumes.

Lambert painted the portrait with broad brushstrokes, and spontaneously, as a kind of ‘performance in paint’. When exhibited, it stood out from the prevalent brown tonalist portraiture painted at this time by other Australian artists, such as John Longstaff and W.B. McInnes. (W.B. McInnes’s much more restrained Portrait of Miss Collins was awarded the Archibald Prize for 1924 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Lambert’s tour de force was purchased for 600 guineas by the Art Gallery of New South Wales when it was shown at the New South Wales Society of Artists exhibition in 1922; at that time the highest price paid by a public gallery for a portrait by an Australian artist.

During the early 1900s, images of women and children were a favourite subject for traditional and more modern artists alike. In Portrait group (The mother), Lambert contrasted two women: one wearing the kind of billowing dress worn in feminist and artistic circles, and the other standing next to her with her hand placed cavalierly on her shoulder, wearing a fashionable black satin waisted coat and a high-necked dress. In this way he contrasted the supple, rounded form of one woman against the more statuesque figure of the other, and in so doing suggested the difference between a woman’s role as a mother and that as an independent woman. As with his other family groups he used his wife and children as models, together with their artist friend Thea Proctor.

This is one of a number of images of women and children that Lambert painted, to which he gave objective titles such as Equestrian portrait of a boy (cat.26) and Holiday in Essex (cat.44) rather than the subjective ‘The artist’s family’ or ‘Amy, Maurice and Constant’. He intended his wife and children to signify the ‘ideal’ mother and children and not to represent themselves. He sometimes depicted his second son Constant dressed in a frock that was then used for baby boys, as in this work, and generally with his genitalia hidden, so that he could be viewed as any child and not specifically as this particular boy-child.

Lambert’s depiction of the boy in the long coat with his feet firmly planted on the ground looking out of the picture with an expression of roguish defiance resembles Velázquez’s portrait Philip IV of Spain in brown and silver 1632 (National Gallery, London). The stance of this figure also recalls Hans Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII or Reynolds’s mock-heroic Master Crewe as Henry VIII 1776 (private collection). Lambert appropriated the pose, which through its common usage had become part of the general vocabulary of art. Lambert admitted that ‘the pose and atmosphere are traditional enough; and has actually no more relationship with Spanish art than with anything modern’ (ML MSS A1811 p.70). What is more, the costume came about by accident. Maurice was originally going to be painted in a white shirt, but one day he was fooling around with his father’s coat and Lambert, delighted with this image, incorporated it into the painting.

In this family group Lambert worked in the tradition of prominent society portrait painter Charles Furse. Like Furse, Lambert did not seek to paint a naturalistic outdoor image, particularly in his depiction of the landscape and the placement of the figures in it. Rather, he wanted to create a decorative effect, using the billowing forms of the clouds to enhance the rounded shapes of the figures, and deliberately placing dark shapes against light. In discussing this picture Lambert observed that ‘the dextrous brushwork, the following of the contours, the suave movement of drapery and clouds – are distinctly influenced by Furze’. (Lambert 1924, p.13)

The painting received favourable comment from contemporary London critics. The Times suggested on 4 May 1907 that the painting was ‘full of promise for the future’, while P.G. Konody, who became a staunch supporter of Lambert’s work, noted in the supplement to the Observer on 5 May 1907 that it was ‘painted with such freshness and such musical sense of colour that it is as bracing as a sea-breeze after the studio-made articles that abound all round’. He went on to suggest that Lambert’s ‘chief aim seems to have been the realisation of a decorative effect by rhythmic arrangement of line and balance of masses’.

This work is reported to have been Amy Lambert’s favourite portrait group.

A sergeant of the Light Horse is a tribute to a type of Australian, generally a product of a rural background, who became part of the national mythology during the First World War: the Light Horseman.

Lambert posed his subject in his flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up and forearms bare, seated in the open air before a ridge of scrubby hills and a blue sky. He is in a meditative position, with eyes glancing downwards. The Light Horseman holds his much-prized plumed hat to his chest – as if he has removed it in respect for his dead comrades, about whom his lowered eyes suggest he may be thinking.

The portrait is painted in the high-key palette which Lambert adopted as a result of his appreciation of Botticelli’s paintings from fifteenth-century Florence and his desire to paint a picture which would look good under any light. Botticelli’s influence can also be found in the downward look, the elegant, slender neck, the long-fingered hands with clearly delineated nails and the sculptured features of the face.

This work demonstrates Lambert’s observance of a balanced structure: the oval head is counterpoised against the circular form of the hat. The head is silhouetted against the brilliant blue, cloud-dotted sky and separated from and lifted above the V-shaped outline of the hills, which is mirrored in reverse in the shoulders, followed through with a repetitive echo in the (sergeant’s) stripes of the jacket and the angle of the elbow, and seen again in the pointed curl of the hair and the angular chin.

Lambert gave this serviceman a sensuousness through his sharp-focus rendering of flesh and musculature, and in the way he portrayed the taut neck and wiry arms. As Hans Heysen observed, ‘the feeling way the eyes have been painted and the expression of that sensitiveness around the mouth are truly wonderful’ (Thiele, p.295).

This image of a Light Horseman matches the official account of the Australian Light Horseman who served in Palestine. H.S. Gullett wrote: ‘So far as a distinctive type has been evolved it is … young men long of limb and feature, spare of flesh, easy and almost tired in bearing’. The long-limbed, lean and languid figure that Lambert portrayed fits easily with such a description. So too does this soldier’s rather sensitive glance for, as Gullett observed, the Light Horseman ‘for all his unconventional ways … was at least distinguished by shyness and reserve. The young countryman leads a simple and peaceful life. He bears himself modestly … A felt slouch hat, a shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, long trousers …’ (Gullett 1936, pp.34–6).

The model for this Light Horseman is reputed to be Thomas Herbert Ivers (1881–1940), a sergeant with the 1st Signal Squadron who was employed colouring contour maps for the War Records Section in Palestine. He met Lambert during the latter’s visit to Damascus in 1919. Ivers was granted leave to assist Lambert with his large battle paintings in London from September 1919 to February 1920.

This work is about an Australian type, his relationship to the countryside and his memories of his mates. Lambert created a new model for a military portrait; instead of the noble, the dashing and the heroic subjects of previous wars he presented a humble, but not humbled, man; he is shown in all simplicity without the pomp of his full-dress uniform, without the glamour and superior status of a horse, and he is the stronger for this. As Alexander Colquhoun wrote in the Melbourne Herald , on 11 May 1921, this was seen as ‘a truly distinctive figure, and constitutes the most original and descriptive presentment of a Digger which we have yet seen here’.

More important is Lambert’s use, in this painting, of the image which perfectly matched certain powerful ideas current in the then-young Australian commonwealth. The image met a need for national self-definition. Australians who were formed by bush life, by working with animals and the elements in a blond land under a blue sky, would become the no-nonsense, unceremonious soldiers who excelled at war in the lands of the ancient Mediterranean, but knew its cost, were appalled by it, and would not romanticise it. They were tough, wiry and tender.

It is also significant that the landscape setting in biblical Palestine has been made to resemble the familiar convention of a blue-and-gold Australian landscape.

The work was purchased for the National Gallery of Victoria, on the advice of its director Bernard Hall, from Lambert’s return-to-Australia exhibition at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, in 1921. It was reproduced on an Australian one-dollar stamp issued in 1974.

This painting presents a group of people in a reflected image. They stand in the low-beamed living-room of Belwethers, a cottage in the village of Cranleigh. The former country cottage of Mrs Halford, Lambert’s patron and friend, had been taken over by her daughter Mary and her son-in-law Sir Edmund Davis after her death in 1915. Sir Edmund stands at the window in the background; his wife, dressed in black, sits at the table; a maid serves tea; Amy Lambert, dressed in blue, stands; Sir Edmund’s sister-in-law Amy Halford sits with her hands on her lap; and the artist looks out of the image in the foreground. The oak beams in the ceiling take up half the picture and become, in the reflection, curved instead of straight lines, causing the design to flow in a circle – disturbing the very solidity of the room.

It is a jewel-like piece of painting, with the lustre of a looking-glass, in which Lambert explored the distinction between how things appear in the picture or in a mirror, or how they are in life itself. He placed the artist within the painting on a separate plane from the other people within the scene, and showed him ignoring them and looking out to the viewer – observing the entire scene through a convex mirror. His hand thrusts forward, without a brush, spread wide as it would when distorted in a mirror.

In 1916 Lambert visited Cranleigh, Surrey, when his son Constant became seriously ill with osteomyelitis while he was a scholarship pupil at Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, West Sussex. (Cranleigh is situated halfway between Guildford and Horsham.) Constant’s condition was so grave that Lambert and Amy moved to Cranleigh to be near him. To pass the time, and determined not to give way to brooding over his sick son, Lambert painted The convex mirror , the reflection of a room in this cottage. Yet Lambert captured some of his sadness at the death of Mrs Halford (who acted as a grandmother to his children) and his anxiety over his son’s illness, as well as the universal unease and apprehension created by the First World War, in the way he presented the world through a convex mirror – disturbed and distorted.

Lambert carefully constructed the painting, drawing the lines of the beams and other structural elements onto the wood panel before commencing the painting. He used fine brushes to convey the scene. In addition to his masterful depiction of the illusion of a room viewed through a convex mirror, he also captured a soft light coming through the windows and lighting up the tablecloth and the cane chair.

Lambert saluted the sixteenth-century Italian mannerist painter Parmigianino’s illusionist tour-de-force, Self-portrait in a convex mirr or 1523–24 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) in this painting. Like Parmigianino Lambert painted his work by looking at himself (and the others in the room) in a curved mirror and then recreating the effect. As in Parmigianino’s work, he captured the way the mirror widens the scene, enlarging everything nearby and making everything distant seem further away. But most significantly, like the Italian master, he created a display of virtuosity.

Many artists have included a convex mirror in their work, such as van Eyck in The Arnolfini portrait 1434 (National Gallery, London) in which the mirror probably reflects the painter himself; Quentin Massys in The moneylender and his wife 1514 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which reflects the artist and the outer world into the picture; and Caravaggio in Martha and Mary Magdalene c.1598 (Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan), in which the artist used the mirror to enable Martha to reproach Mary for her vanity.

The mirror device was fashionable at the turn of the century, and frequently used by artists such as William Orpen. Orpen depicted himself reflected in a convex mirror on the wall behind his subjects in both The mirror 1900 (Tate, London) and A Bloomsbury family 1907 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) – a device Orpen borrowed from van Eyck’s TheArnolfini portrait , which he would have known in the National Gallery. Likewise, genteel interiors, universes of the private individual, were popular subjects during this period, particularly in the exhibitions of the New English Art Club. In this work, Lambert depicted mistresses and maids, and the daily domestic ritual of tea. He depicted people reading and reflecting in the comfort of familiar surroundings. He also showed the master looking out the window and the wider world beyond. And he presented sun coming through the windows and lighting up the interior.

Thea Proctor wrote in The Home on 1 July 1930 that The convex mirror ‘has the exquisite finish of the Dutch Masters, and shows that a present-day artist could also paint small things in a large manner’.

Henry Lawson (1867–1922) wrote poetry and short stories about Australian life which had a popular appeal; he became a legendary figure in his lifetime. He established a natural colloquial voice and wrote in a lucid, understated prose style, with immense sympathy for the hard lives of those who lived in the bush. His stories include ‘The drover’s wife’, and two of his collections, While the billy boils (1896) and Joe Wilson and his mates (1901), remain classics of Australian literature. Like the majority of Australians, Lawson lived in a city and had limited experience of country life. During his last twenty years he only wrote spasmodically, as he suffered from alcoholism and mental illness. He was the first Australian writer to be granted a state funeral, attended by the Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, and the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang. Lawson’s image appeared on Australia’s first ten-dollar note, issued in 1966 (ADB).

In this sculpture Lambert created a lifelike, roughly dressed individual, accompanied by a swagman, a dog and a fence post, an image that was eminently natural and Australian. The Sydney Morning Herald critic suggested on 26 March 1930 that ‘the central figure shows a remarkable likeness to the poet’, and certainly Lambert portrayed him with his identifiable bushy eyebrows and moustache. He faithfully captured the posture and dress of a particular man at a specific time, but he was concerned principally with evoking a state of mind: he showed Lawson making the gesture he usually did when he was searching for a thought or reciting verse. By showing Lawson in the company of a swagman (‘Sundowner’ was the term in 1930) and dog, Lambert suggested the poet’s allegiance to the poor and humble, and created a visual metaphor of Australian mateship.

Lambert’s carefully constructed but understated work embodies the poet’s prose style, which was consciously crafted to have a natural effect. Such a laconic naturalness has become an identifiably Australian characteristic, and to this extent Lambert’s approach in this work also conveys an Australian attitude.

The sculpture also has a more general aspect: the swagman and his dog could be characters from one of Lawson’s bush stories. The old man hints at the older Lawson himself, a man who became a dishevelled figure as a result of alcoholism and mental illness. In this way Lambert created a specific image of the two ages of Lawson, and a universal one of the two ages of man.

Lawson’s son Jim posed for the figure of Lawson, and the model for the swagman was Conrad von Hagen (Wilson 2004, p.145). Lambert, however, went beyond mere likeness: Lawson’s pose, with his outstretched right arm and stooped back, resembles that of St John in Rodin’s St John the Baptist preaching 1878–80, which Lambert may have known from the cast presented to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1902. The seated swagman in this sculpture, his right hand held up to his face and left arm relaxed over his knee, may derive from Rodin’s best known work, The thinker 1880, which Lambert may have known from a cast which was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1921. The pose of the standing figure is also like that of the classical marble sculpture Hermes Logios , the god of oratory. And as noted above (see cats 102, 103), the pose of Lambert’s loose-kneed gesturing figure of Lawson also resembles that of Michelangelo’s marble sculpture Bacchus 1497 (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence), and that of the swagman is similar to Michelangelo’s depiction of the prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel, Rome.

The sculpture was formally commissioned by the organising committee of the Henry Lawson Memorial Fund on 18 November 1927, though Lambert had been notified of his selection in December 1926. The committee had raised funds from the public, including thousands of school children (ML MSS 97/7, item 27). The brief had specified a work of art which showed Lawson as an Australian of the bush, as well as an accurate bronze likeness of him. The sculpture had to be dressed as a bush worker without coat or vest, with his shirt open to the neck, close fitting trousers (not riding breeches), boots of the type worn by Australian soldiers during the war and a soft felt hat which had lost its stiffness (ML MSS 97/5). Apart from the soft felt hat, Lambert’s sculpture met the committee’s specification.

In 1926 Lambert had made several pencil studies for this group, and a sketch for the proposed group in its Sydney parkland setting. The final work was unveiled in the Domain, Sydney, on 28 July 1931 by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game.