Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

looking at them', while relatives of Proctor have vehemently denied such an accusation, suggesting that she was not interested in sex.10Certainly with his elegant manners, handsome looks and theatrical air, Lambert cut a rather dashing figure but one senses an ambivalence to sexuality which perhaps had more to do with his obsession with work than any other factor.1 However, as Proctor burnt all her letters from Lambert before she died (surely an act that would imply there was something to protect) and as Amy Lambert chose not to be explicit about Lambert's relationship with Proctor, speculation about the true nature of their friendship will no doubt continue.12 Lambert's drinking companion was, at this time, the artist Augustus John, and it was perhaps John's ménage à trois with his wife Ida and mistress Dorella that inspired Lambert's desire for (or the appearance of) a similar domestic arrangement. Whatever the situation, one feels that it was not Thea Proctor who was Amy Lambert's rival, but his work (which he called 'my sorrow and my joy, my burden, or my birthright').13 Another element in Lambert's withdrawal from his wife may have been Amy's working-class background and comparative lack of education, though her humble origins had once been a point in common between them. As Lambert was by now mixing with the likes of Nellie Melba and George Bernard Shaw, he perhaps found Amy to be rather an embarrassment and a handicap on his ambitions to win social and professional acclaim.1'1 Portrait group (The mother) depicts Amy in a billowing cream silk dress, her hat in hand and her hair tied casually behind. She seems to be a woman totally at peace with her life and with her role as the mother of the two small boys.15Thea Proctor, her arm placed lightly on Amy's shoulder, is dressed much more formally and wears a large, plumed hat. The two women, leaning towards each other in a fond embrace, are represented very much as equals, though quite differently and subtly distinguished as the maternal woman and the professional woman. The older boy, Maurice, stands independently of the two women and stares at the artist, in a pose reminiscent, as Anne Gray identifies, of several well-known seventeenth-century portraits.16The baby, dressed in luxuriant cream silk taffeta, all but merges with his mother, to whom he clings. The composition, an unbalanced triangle, constantly forces the eye's attention back to the face of the mother. The rich effects of silk, taffeta, feathers, lace, ribbons and velvet effectively conjure an impression of an earlier period and resulted from Lambert's study of the work of Velázquez. Lambert's friendship with Hugh Ramsay, when both were students in Paris, also reinforced his interest in the problems posed by the use of white-on-white, which Ramsay executed so brilliantly in his painting The Sisters 1904 (AGNSW). It is the technical mastery achieved in the handling of colour and texture that makes Portrait group (The mother) one of Lambert's best. Lambert also achieved a dazzling boldness through silhouetting his models in front of a pale blue and white sky, a technique he used in most of his major paintings. As he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, he was interested in Revivalism, in finding a way to combine the traditions of the great masters of painting (apart from Velázquez, he admired Rubens, van Dyke, Manet and Veronese) with a modem technical proficiency, though later he regretted that so much of his study of the great artists concentrated on the effects produced, rather than the means of production.17However, he was much criticised for his inability to lend proper and true expression to his sitters and for a quality of finish that was empty aside from its bravura of handling and admirable technique. Lambert's other paintings on the same theme — The blue hat, Holiday in Essex and Family group — narrate the ongoing labyrinth that the relationship between the adults had become. The blue hat 1909 depicts the same cast but with a significant difference — Thea Proctor is standing on the right of the canvas, turning away from the main group of mother and children. In this work, the mother seems to totally 106 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965