Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

FAMILY AND A SPECIAL FRIEND George Washington Lambert Portrait group (The mother) Candice Bruce Facing page George W. Lambert Australia 1873-1930 Portrait group (The mother) 1907 Oil on canvas 204.5 X162.5cm Purchased with the assistance of S. H. Ervin 1965 Queensland Art Gallery Above George W. Lambert Self portrait (unfinished) c.1908 Oil on canvas 92.1 X 71.3cm Gift of Dr Robert Graham Brown 1941 Queensland Art Gallery Right George W. Lambert The artist and his wife 1904 Oil on canvas 81.5 x81.5cm Purchased 1965 Queensland Art Gallery hough not a painting of a named sitter, Portrait group (The mother) 1907 (Queensland Art Gallery) nevertheless belongs to that category of art — Edwardian salon portraiture — which flourished in England in the first decade of the twentieth century. The portrait's development from the eighteenth-century traditions of Reynolds and Gainsborough, through those expounded by John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler (as well as the lesser known James Jebusa Shannon, Charles Wellington Furse and John Lavery, known as 'The Slashing School'), gave it an unprecedented eminence as a genre. These were works especially characterised by flamboyance and bravura, where old master techniques were combined with a freshness that was distinctly modem, and they disappeared, along with the elegant and unhurried lifestyle they depicted, with the arrival of the First World War.1 Portrait group (The mother) 1907 is one of a series of works that feature the artist's wife, Amy, and their children, Maurice and Constant, other works being Family group 1908 (National Gallery of Australia) and Holiday in Essex 1910 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales). It is also one of several works, such as The holiday group 1907 (Art Gallery of South Australia) and The blue hat 1909 (Kerry Stokes Collection), which include Lambert's friend and colleague, the artist Thea Proctor. George Lambert met his future wife Amy Abseil in 1898 while he was studying at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School with her sister Marian. Amy worked as a retoucher at Falks, the photographers, 102 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965