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

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 e