National Gallery Of Australia | Audio Tour | George.w.lambert Retrospective

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, Ch