Studio: international art (51.1911)

Mr. G. W. Lambert's Paintings

through with sound and speedy craft, on the
method laid down by his School’s head.

We, on the other hand, are notoriously strong in
the matters of “ high art.” The packets of labels
needed to explain advanced movements and the
prevalent custom of “painting for posterity,” as
regards the quality of our pigment, would badly
puzzle men like Lely or Van Dyck, who began the
other end. Mr. Lambert, by the way, is the first
young painter I have heard express appreciation
and practise emulation of Sir Peter. The steps by
which he has reached this attitude are interesting
not only as elucidating his development, but also
as an indictment of the unordered education that
fails to train the students of to-day. Bom in 1873
in St. Petersburg, he was brought to England five
years later. For some six years he lived in
Yeovil, there just touching the tedious fringe of
academic training as re-
presented by the regular
South Kensington provin-
cial system. From this,
however, he must soon
have recovered when at
the end of that period he
went to Australia to the
Bush. In that untram-
melled atmosphere, riding,
working, and drawing in-
cidentally, he dwelt until
in 1891, coming into
town, he entered the
Sydney School of Art,
under Julian Rosse
Ashton. Therein his train-
ing as an artist seriously
began and, from what I
make of it, it is to that
Academy and its principal
that Mr. Lambert dedi-
cates the larger portion of
what he feels he owes for
his instruction. There, at
any rate, he learned to
draw, rigorously working
in the antique and later
in the life. The upshot
was a three years’ scholar-
ship in 1901, that brought
him over to the Paris
studios.

They rather struck him
as a less individual affair
than the school he had

16

travelled all the way from Sydney to improve
upon, and equally, if not more, unsuccessful in
providing what really was the conspicuous need.
As to what that was he had little difficulty in
discovering. In turn, I daresay, he and many of
his fellow-students dabbled in the latest cries, in
varying stages of impressionism, in brushes of
peculiar magnitude, in atmosphere or neo-primitif
isms. Certainly they made a practice of painting
life-sized nudes with more or less effect and no
idea of ordered craftsmanship. And it was just
this that struck Mr. Lambert, after two precious
years of the scholarship had run, that neither at
Carl Rossi’s nor at Delacluse’s was there any man
to show him a sane, sound, ordered system, a
working method. Penetrating to the Louvre and
looking up at the Fete Champetre, at Van Dyck
and Velasquez, he always had been aware of the

‘DONA SOL’

BY G. W. LAMBERT