Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Sketchbook with horse and figure studies

Sketchbook with horse and figure studies

1918–19
Pencil, ink and charcoal drawings on paper
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DL PX 71

Late in 1917 the Australian High Commission in London appointed Sydney-trained artist George Lambert to travel to Palestine as one of Australia’s official war artists. He was given the rank of honorary lieutenant and departed from London on 25 December 1917 for the Middle East.

On arriving in Egypt, Lambert wrote:

"My first job was to make some small paintings of our great base camp at Moascar near Ismalia a few miles from the Suez Canal and here my first impressions again were worth recording. Miles and miles of tents and desert, thousands of sweating sunbronzed men and beautiful horses. Tent, by the bye, that is, miles of tents out there to the artist give a continuous but ever changing problem in colour, time and form [1].

Over the next five months and during a return visit to Gallipoli in early 1919 shortly after the war’s end, Lambert filled a series of books with sketches, studies and notes in preparation for his larger commissioned paintings. During this return visit, war historian Charles Bean described Lambert as 'more sensitive than the rest of us to the tragedy – or at any rate the horror – of Anzac’ [2]."

‘The curse of the Official Artist’

Born in St Petersburg, Russia, George Lambert arrived in Australia as a 14-year-old with his mother in 1887. He worked initially at a sheep station near Warren in central NSW before taking up a job as a clerk in Sydney and attending night art classes with Julian Ashton at the Art Society of NSW. Lambert worked for another two years as a station-hand, developing a lifelong love of horses and rural life which was clearly reflected in his art.


In 1900 he won the first NSW Travelling Art Scholarship, which allowed him travel to London and Paris, where he studied and lived until the outbreak of World War I. Unable to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force, he joined a Voluntary Training Corps. In December 1917 he was appointed as an official war artist to produce 25 sketches and a painting of the Charge of the Light Horse at Beersheba, which had occurred on 31 October 1917. In the notes Lambert made during his time in the Middle East, he writes of ‘the curse of the Official Artist, the sense of hurry caused by having to work to military schedule’.*


Footnotes

* George Washington Thomas Lambert papers re war service, 1915–19, MLMSS 97 Box 4, Item 6