Studio: international art (51.1911)

Mr. G. WLambert's Paintings

perfection of their craft and the beauty and science
of their pigment. His own preoccupation with the
various things one called “high art”; and above
all the system of training that permitted students
to go on painting and repainting on a study until
by sheer weight of plastered pigment some sort of
imitative appearance was achieved, these things,
compared with the selective method, the considered
process of the Venetian, the Fleming, or the
Spaniard, suddenly appeared as inconceivably
absurd, as intolerably crude. To use his own
phrase, he “pulled out” of the atelier Delacluse
and sought in his own studio to acquire a formu-
lated method.

I need not say that this was no simple business.
To unlearn towards the term of studentship the
habits, and to wean oneself from the laxnesses of
that period, entail long struggles ; for in such a
case not only are involved
the quality and texture of
paint, but also the inesti-
mable importance of
severity of drawing and
design. Relentlessly the
tricks and cleverness of
high art had to be dis-
carded, and sacrificed the
easy unsound styles and
effective glossings. In fine
Mr. Lambert came to the
conclusion that a clean
sweep of such bric-a-brac
as he had amassed was
inevitable and an imme-
diate recourse to strict
simplicity the only remedy.

With this in mind it be-
comes only natural to put
his work into two periods ;
in one whatever was pro-
duced while he was getting
rid of the old haphazard
plan of “going on until
one got the look of the
thing,” in the other the
canvases in which he had
hit upon an ordered pro-
cess and was pursuing it
with more or less address.

To 1906 I think we
should look to see him so
definitely across the line
that he might be said to
have arrived at a new “the admiral: 1810

manner, though, as has been indicated, he had for
some little time then been making for the change.
A self-portrait of that date thus is a landmark, and
it is again interesting evidence of Mr. Lambert’s
subsequent advance that the model on which he
based the manipulation of that head was the late
Velazquez Philip, in Trafalgar Square. For we
see by a comparison of that self-portrait with the
Holiday in Essex, of this year, how our painter
has gone on by going back. Back from the atmo-
spheric vision of a splendidly mature art towards
the severe research that almost always has marked
the earlier work of the greater men. Unless I
misapprehend him, Velazquez’ bodegone pieces to-
day would most excite Mr. Lambert’s emulation.
In 1906 he also painted Going to Bathe, a canvas
that still is his most complete rendering of the
fusing influence of atmosphere. Of this fusion

BY G. W. LAMBERT

19