‘A common family name, but an uncommon family’, is how Andrew Motion the biographer of the Lambert family described them. George Lambert was born in St Petersburg of American / British parents, educated in England and spent his teenage years in the outback of Australia before becoming an Australian official war artist. His sons Constant and Maurice were equally accomplished. The elder son, Maurice (1901-1964), became a sculptor and worked mainly in wood and stone. His work was in the modernist tradition and he became the Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy School in London. Constant (1905-1951) was a composer and conductor, who wrote a ballet for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes company and several fine orchestral and choral works. Constant’s son Kit (1935-1981) was involved in films before taking on an unknown rock band and propelling them to stardom. This band was The Who.

The women in the Lambert family are more shadowy. Both George’s mother Annie (nee Firth) and his own wife Amy (1872-1964, nee Absell) largely managed households without their husbands. Annie had to manage four young children when her husband (George Washington Lambert – the engineer) died just two months before the birth of George Washington Thomas Lambert – the future artist. And Amy coped with George’s long absences as an official war artist or when he was completing important commissions. If you are interested in a detailed biography of the Lambert family see Andrew Motion The Lamberts: George, Constant & Kit, Chatto & Windus, London, 1986.

Janda

When the Australian Historical Mission left Gallipoli on 10 March 1919 they sailed up to Constantinople (Istanbul) before embarking on a 1500 mile rail journey that would take them across Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt and into Cairo where they dispersed. The rail link through the Taurus Mountains had only been recently opened and was being used to transport Tukish and Allied troops back and forth across Asia Minor.

For their overland journey the party was assigned two long enclosed horse or cattle trucks in the train. One truck was converted to a mess room and kitchen where Lambert with the help of Sergeant G Hunter Rogers cooked the meals and slept. During the trip Lambert and Rogers frequently served up three course meals and Lambert regaled the group with impersonations of British officers and stories of his time in the Sinai with the Light Horse.

Charles Bean in Gallipoli Mission described the journey as one of “extraordinary interest and, in parts, through scenery both grand and beautiful, in country with a history going back much farther than St Paul; where Assyrians, Lydians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs, Turks, Crusaders – and in these modern times Napoleon and ourselves – had marched and fought.” Along the way they passed trains crowded with Turkish troops who were demobilising.

Lambert described the rail journey (through the Taurus Mountains) as taking them through “what I think is the most spectacular country in all that part of the world that I have travelled in.” Fortunately, we have one image from this part of the trip that indicates how Lambert responded to the landscape. At one point the train made a brief halt high up in the mountains. Lambert was able to make a quick sketch of the landscape on the back of one of his Gallipoli paintings. The painting (right) was only roughly sketched in but clearly outlines the form of the place and the distant peak of the Taurus Mountains covered in snow.

As the train wound down from the mountains it passed through Adana and then Aleppo where Lambert was able to make another quick study (left). Changing trains the group passed through Jerusalem and then onto Cairo where they dispersed in early April. Throughout most of April and May Lambert was confined to a Cairo hospital with dysentery and malaria. On 31 May he was discharged from hospital and travelled to Semakh where he resumed his work as a war artist.

Janda

Lambert was interested in the small details of the landscape just as much as the grand vistas. By painting studies of the local flowers and bushes he was able to understand more thoroughly the character, form and colours of a particular site. When he arrived on Gallipoli he made notes about the local plants: “The scrub is greenish with nice dead stuff showing grey purple here & there. I propose getting a record of the various plants & flowers.” 

 

Lambert picked these flowers from the site of a Turkish artillery battery called ‘Beachy Bill’ that had regularly shelled Anzac Cove. On 27 February 1919 he wrote that “we discovered quite a wild garden to-day and I am fixed for a flower-piece if it rains.” The following day it did rain and it was cold and bleak with intermittent showers. With the flowers to hand, Lambert was able to spend the whole day and the next painting this still life. On 1 March he commented: “Again the rain and therefore the account of the day is easy. The flower-piece is finished … The flowers are in a biscuit tin on top of a bed for a tentpole.” He was pleased with the result but felt that he should be painting up at the Nek where the tragic charge of the 3rd Light Horse had taken place in August 1915.

Janda

Charles Bean had great respect for George Lambert. In his book Gallipoli Mission (1948) Bean described Lambert as ‘picturesque’, a great mimic and storyteller. For Bean, Lambert “with the golden beard, the hat, the cloak, the spurs, the gait, the laugh and the conviviality of a cavalier” was a great Australian. But equally, Bean respected Lambert’s dedication to his work and the way he approached his commissions as an official war artist. In his obituary of Lambert published in The Reveille 1930 Bean said “nothing pleased him more than to receive something approximating to an ‘operation order,’ and to carry it out, and come back at dusk formally to report what he had done.” Asked to deliver a minimum of 25 sketches during his first commission in Palestine in 1918, Lambert produced over 150.

In 1924 Lambert painted a portrait of Charles Bean. It is clear from correspondence between the two men and this sympathetic portrait, that Lambert admired Bean. The two men had discussed the terms of Lambert’s 1918 commission to Palestine over dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club in London and it was Bean who had personally insisted that Lambert be appointed to go on the Gallipoli Mission. Likewise Lambert called Bean ’skipper’, ‘the old Bean’ and said “Bean is very interesting,… but he is not scientific, how can a man be scientific & go through these last few years?”

Janda

While he was travelling through Palestine, Lambert would get up early and work all day painting and sketching. This photo by Ossie Coulson was taken near Tiberias in early June 1919 during Lambert’s second tour of Palestine. It is most likely that Lambert was painting the sketch Tiberias when the photo was taken.

On 7 June 1919 Lambert wrote of his visit to Tiberias: ‘I visited and sketched Tiberias a motor ride of about six miles from here. Tiberias [is] really lovely & if one could only begin Palestine from this end of the Desert it would give a much better impression. Round about here there are wonderful subjects just now…’.

Janda

In January 1919 a small group led by Charles Bean left London to travel to Gallipoli. The Australian Historical Mission was comprised of war records section staff, photographers and officers who had served at Gallipoli in 1915. The primary tasks of the mission were to report on the state of the war graves at Gallipoli and for Bean to try and resolve many of the riddles of the 1915 campaign. George Lambert was asked by Bean to go with the mission and to make oil and pencil studies that could later help him create two large works commissioned by the Australian Government for the future Australian War Memorial. Bean was particularly anxious that Lambert be the appointed artist as he felt that Lambert was the best of the Australian artists available. Bean also asked Hubert Wilkins a well known photographer to accompany the Mission and record the landscape through photography.

When the mission arrived at Gallipoli, a Turkish Officer Major Zeki Bey who had fought at Gallipoli joined the group. Zeki Bey walked the ground with Bean exchanging information and giving him a Turkish perspective of the 1915 campaign.

Additionally, the Graves Registration Unit was working in the area locating and identifying the remains of allied soldiers, reburying them and charting the cemeteries. The atmosphere in which Lambert painted was greatly influenced by the work going on around him as bones and bodies were constantly being unearthed, catalogued and then re-interred.The work he produced on Gallipoli is more sombre and muted in colour. He described the landscape of Gallipoli as disturbing and ‘melancholy’ and as he was making ready to depart he wrote to his wife “I cannot tell you how pleased I am at getting clear of this graveyard beautiful as it is nor can I explain how satisfied I am to have done what work I have done.”

Janda

All of us live with landscape all the time. It surrounds us and is part of our lives. This section looks at some different aspects of art, landscape and how these two things can help shape our memories and our view of the world. 

When I first arrived at the War Memorial in February 2005, I started to make these biscuits for the Art Section. Such a simple recipe and steeped with history!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of plain flour
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of rolled oats
• 1 cup of shredded coconut
• 125 gms of butter
• 1 tablespoon of Golden Syrup
• 2 tablespoons of hot water
• salt

Grease – or line with baking paper – a baking tray.

Preheat the oven to 180 degree C.

Combine the dry ingredients – flour, sugar, oats and coconut – add about half a teaspoon of salt. It’s not essential but seems to give a richer more balanced flavour.

Melt the butter and golden syrup and add half of the water. (use the other tablespoon of water if the mixture ends up too dry)

Pour the butter mixture into the dry ingredients and mix everything together really well.

Drop desert spoons of the mixture onto the tray and flatten slightly with the back of the spoon. They will expand a bit so leave some space around them.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until golden, take out and let stand for a few minutes before putting on a wire rack to cool.

If your’e feeling adventurous, you can add other ingredients to make variations: strawberry Anzacs, lemon Anzacs and even white chocolate Anzacs all seem to work well.

Read more about ANZAC Biscuits.

We are using this blog to introduce the Australian War Memorial’s new exhibition George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine landscapes. The exhibition will open at the Memorial on 30 March 2007 and run through until 29 July 2007. After that it will go on an extensive Australian tour. Check out the Tour page for details of the itinerary.

Lambert was an Australian official war artist during the First World War. He travelled to the Middle East in 1918 and in 1919 joined the Australian Historical Mission to Gallipoli. At the completion of his time at Gallipoli he travelled on to the Middle East to make some further studies of battlefields that were important to the story of Australia’s involvement in the war. Lambert worked on small oil panels and also made a great many watercolours and pencil drawings during his time as an official war artist. Many of these were preparatory studies for his major commissioned works that are held by the Australian War Memorial.

On this site we will have some information about the exhibition and its key theme – ‘landscape’. Curators and conservators will contribute posts about how the exhibition is being put together and outline some of the work involved in presenting an exhibition for tour. There will also be info about George Lambert and a few of his contemporaries as well as pages that relate to the regional tour, the official war art scheme, links to other sites of interest and from April 2007 a live blog feed coming in from Gallipoli.

The blog does not aim to provide an online version of the exhibition. It is instead intended to present an account of its development, and a forum for a discussion of the broader issues which are raised by the exhibition. Where possible and appropriate, feedback will be moderated and included on the blog.

Contributors

Janda Gooding is the Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial. Janda is the main moderator of this blog and curator of the George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine landscapes exhibition.

Warwick Heywood is Assistant Curator in the Art Section at the Memorial.

Nigel Steel is on loan to us from the Imperial War Museum in London for 12 months where he is usually the Head of the Research and Information Department and the IWM’s chief historian. He started with us in late August 2006 and will be a familiar face and voice to regular watchers of the History Channel. He also appeared as himself in Tolga Ornek’s 2005 film Gallipoli.

Mal Booth is Head of the Research Centre at the Memorial and currently curating an exhibition Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse. A blog for that exhibition can be found at http://blog.awm.gov.au/lawrence/ .

Links

Other Australian War Memorial and external sites that might be of interest:

Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse

Focus: Photography & War 1945-2006

Captured in Colour: Rare Photographs from the First World War

Gallipoli 1915: The Drama of the Dardanelles (joint IWM/AWM online exhibition)

Dawn of the Legend: 25 April 1915

Gallipoli Battlefield Tour 2007

The Australian Light Horse Association

Australia in the First World War

Visit Gallipoli website

Australian official war artists

National Gallery of Australia

Radio National Interview ‘Artworks’ site