Henry Taylor LambMCRA (21 June 1883 – 8 October 1960) was an Australian-born British painter. A follower of Augustus John, Lamb was a founder member of the Camden Town Group in 1911 and of the London Group in 1913.
Lamb met his future wife Nina Forrest in 1905 during the final term of his medical studies in Manchester and they ran away to London together that summer. A popular story is that Lamb nicknamed her "Euphemia" because of an apparent resemblance to Mantegna's portrait of Saint Euphemia; it was however her middle name.[3][4] They were married in May 1906 when she became pregnant but she lost the baby due to a miscarriage. The relationship was short-lived, but they did not divorce until 1927[5] shortly before Henry married Pansy Pakenham.[6]
In 1908, 1910 and 1911 Lamb worked in Brittany, where he painted his most famous work, Death of a Peasant.[7]
World War One
Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment (1919), (Art.IWM ART 2746)
At the start of World War One, Lamb returned to his medical studies and qualified as a doctor at Guy's Hospital.[1] Lamb saw active service in the First World War in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a battalion medical officer with the 5th Battalion, The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and was awarded the Military Cross. Lamb served in Palestine and on the Western Front and was badly gassed not long before the end of the war. In February 1918, before he was demobilised, Lamb was approached by British War Memorials Committee of the Ministry of Information to produce a large painting for a proposed national Hall of Remembrance. After he was demobilised in March 1919, Lamb began work on the painting, Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment, which is now in the Imperial War Museum.[8]
World War Two
After the war Lamb settled in Poole, Dorset, where he remained for a number of years. In December 1940, he was appointed a full-time war artist to the War Office by the War Artists' Advisory Committee and throughout the war was to produce a large number of portraits and figure paintings. As well as portraits of high-ranking commanders, Lamb painted servicemen and women, operations at Old Sarum aerodrome and tank training exercises. Throughout the winter of 1941, he was attached to the 12th Canadian Army Tank Battalion, then training in southern England, before doing a series of Auxiliary Territorial Service and Anti-Aircraft Command personnel portraits.[9] The Imperial War Museum held an exhibition of Lamb's wartime work in 1958, and again in 1961.[10]
Recognition
Death of a peasant, 1911, oil on canvas, 485 × 420 mm, Te Papa
Lamb is noted for his unusual portraits, as exemplified by his well-known picture of an elongated Lytton Strachey.[11] He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1940 and was made a full Member in 1949. He was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1942 and of the Tate Gallery from 1944 to 1951.[12] His auction record was set at Christie's in London in June 2006 when his 1910 Breton Boy oil on panel fetched £60,000.[13] As well as the Imperial War Museum, works by Lamb are held in regional museums throughout Britain, in the British Government Art Collection[14] and in the National Gallery of Canada, which received the majority of Lamb's portraits of Canadian troops at the end of World War Two.[9]
The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts." Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. A well-known quote, attributed to Dorothy Parker, is "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles".
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
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Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, the former being a First World War memorial while the latter was a commission for the War Artists' Advisory Committee during the Second World War.
George Claude Leon Underwood was a British artist, although primarily known as a sculptor, printmaker and painter, he was also an influential teacher and promotor of African art. His travels in Mexico and West Africa had a substantial influence on his art, particularly on the representation of the human figure in his sculptures and paintings. Underwood is best known for his sculptures cast in bronze, carvings in marble, stone and wood and his drawings. His lifetime's work includes a wide range of media and activities, with an expressive and technical mastery. Underwood did not hold modernism and abstraction in art in high regard and this led to critics often ignoring his work until the 1960s when he came to be viewed as an important figure in the development of modern sculpture in Britain.
Dora de Houghton Carrington, known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
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Philip Wilson Steer was a British painter of landscapes, seascapes plus portraits and figure studies. He was also an influential art teacher. His sea and landscape paintings made him a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain but in time he turned to a more traditional English style, clearly influenced by both John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, and spent more time painting in the countryside rather than on the coast. As a painting tutor at the Slade School of Art for many years he influenced generations of young artists.
Sir Eric Clare Edmund Phipps was a British diplomat.
Henry Tonks, FRCS was a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist. He became an influential art teacher.
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Mary Adshead was an English painter, muralist, illustrator and designer.
Sydney William Carline was a British artist and teacher known for his depictions of aerial combat painted during World War One.
Darsie Napier Japp MC was an English painter and soldier.
Euphemia Lamb was an English artists' model and the wife of painter Henry Lamb. She modelled for Augustus John and Jacob Epstein and came to exemplify the sexual freedom of the bohemian lifestyle of the early twentieth century. Henry Lamb called her Euphemia, by which name she was generally known. John Maynard Keynes commented that Euphemia had more of a sex life "than the rest of us put together". She was one of the lovers of the occultist Aleister Crowley.
Richard Cotton Carline was a British artist, arts administrator and writer. During the First World War, Carline served on the Western Front and in the Middle East, where he travelled extensively through Palestine, Syria, India and modern day Iran and Iraq. Although known for his depictions of aerial combat painted during World War One, from the mid-1930s, his output as an artist was overshadowed by his numerous roles in local, national and international artists' organisations. Carline held strong anti-fascist beliefs and also worked to gain appreciation for African art, naive art, child artists and even promote the artistic merits of postcard images.
Henrietta Frances Phipps was a British landscape gardener. Phipps worked for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for many years and "shaped the look of the royal borough".
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