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

  • Autor: Vários
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Sinopsis

Audio guide to seventeen key works from the 2007 NGA George.W.Lambert Retrospective : heroes & icons shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 29 June 16 September 2007

Episodios

  • George LAMBERT, Lotty and a lady 1906

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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

  • George LAMBERT, Chesham Street [Chesney Street; The Doctor; Harley Street] 1910

    21/09/2007 Duración: 01min

    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 i

  • George LAMBERT, Miss Helen Beauclerk 1914

    21/09/2007 Duración: 01min

    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 l

  • George LAMBERT, Across the black soil plains 1899

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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 hors

  • George LAMBERT, Self-portrait with gladioli 1922

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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

  • George LAMBERT, The squatter's daughter 1923-24

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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 ce

  • George LAMBERT, The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915 1924

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    George LAMBERT, The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915 1924, oil on canvas, 152.5 (h) x 305.7 (w) cm, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, commissioned in 1919, acquired in 1925

  • George LAMBERT, Anzac, the landing 1915 1920-2

    21/09/2007 Duración: 01min

    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 thes

  • George LAMBERT, Recumbent figure of a soldier (Unknown soldier) [Unknown soldier] 1928-31

    21/09/2007 Duración: 01min

    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 o

  • George LAMBERT, Miss Thea Proctor 1903

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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

  • George LAMBERT, Important people c.1914, 1915, 1921

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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

  • George LAMBERT, Geelong Grammar School war memorial 1923-7

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    George LAMBERT, Geelong Grammar School war memorial 1923-7, bronze, 244.0 (h) x 146.0 (w) x 136.0 (d) cm, Geelong Grammar School, gift of the Old Geelong Grammarians Association in 1927

  • George LAMBERT, Henry Lawson Memorial 1927-31

    21/09/2007 Duración: 03min

    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, accom

  • George LAMBERT, The convex mirror c.1916

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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. H

  • George LAMBERT, A sergeant of the Light Horse [A Sergeant of Light Horse in Palestine] 1920

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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. Thi

  • George LAMBERT, Portrait group (The mother) 1907

    21/09/2007 Duración: 02min

    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

  • George LAMBERT, The white glove 1921

    21/09/2007 Duración: 01min

    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 ind