George Washington Lambert, “The White Glove”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 106 x 78 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Born in September of 1873 in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Washington Thomas Lambert was an Australian portrait artist and a war artist during the First World War. After the death of his father, he and his English mother moved to Württemberg, Germany, to stay with Lambert’s maternal grandfather. Lambert received his education at Kingston College in Somerset, England, after which the family emigrated to Australia, arriving in Sydney in January of 1887.
In 1894, George Lambert began exhibiting his work at the Art Society and the Society of Artists in Sydney. After drawing pen and ink cartoons for a year at The Bulletin magazine, he began painting full time in 1896. Lambert won the Wynne Prize for his 1899 painting “Across the Blacksoil Plains”, a depiction of a heavily laden wagon pulled by a team of draft horses.
Lambert studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney until 1900, after which he won a government traveling scholarship from New South Wales. He spent a few years traveling, first to Paris, and later to London
where he exhibited work at the Royal Academy. At an exhibition in Barcelona in 1911, Lambert won a silver medal for his painting “The Sonnet”.
During the years of the First World War, George Lambert served as an official war artist. His painting “Anzac”, depicting the 1915 landings of forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, is now in the Australian War Memorial collection located in Australia’s capital Canberra. In 1920, Lambert painted another notable work “A Sergeant of the Light Horse”, which he executed in London after retuning from Palestine.
Returning to Australia in 1921, Lambert had a successful solo show in Melbourne at the Fine Art Society. This was the year he painted “The White Glove”, a oil portrait depicting Miss Gladys Neville Collins, the daughter of lawyer J. T. Collins, trustee of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria.
George Lambert posed Miss Collins in a manner suggestive of John Singer Sargent’s 1905 work “Portrait of Ena Wertheimer, ‘a vele gonfie”, with its black white-feathered hat and hand raised in front of chest. Miss Collins’s tilted head, half closed eyes, half open mouth, and almost bare right arm suggests individual sensuality, but also a form of codified behavior. Significantly different from the in-vogue contemporary brown-toned portraits, George Lambert, himself, described it as a wild, dashing portrait.
In 1922, the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired the painting for six hundred guineas ( $53,000 in 2019), at the time the highest price paid by a public gallery for a portrait by an Australian artist. The work remains a part of its collection.
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