George Lambert, Anzac, the landing 1915, 1920 by Atelier Liesjes

About "George Lambert, Anzac, the landing 1915, 1920"

by Atelier Liesjes

About the artwork

One of the iconic paintings in the Memorial's collection. Lambert based the composition on several sources: oil sketches of the terrain he made during the Gallipoli mission in 1919, studio sketches and facts about the landing obtained from veterans and Bean . Important aspects of the landing are included, such as the Australians' arrival on the beach in the lower left corner, their struggle through the scrub and their ascent up the steep slopes. The composition shows the vastness of the landscape, the inhospitable terrain and the smallness of the men in it. Soldiers are shown dead and falling, and smoke rises from artillery fire in the background. The panorama of the landing is compressed and distorted to depict a pictorial narrative of a crucial event.

"Visitors to the museum... complain about a lack of fire, a lack of action and war anxiety, but based on the facts we have to accept that men as equipped as these men were, on their way up this particular spot, without any idea of where the enemy was, what they had to do, would have looked just like this little swarm of ants climbing up, however fast, painfully and laboriously through the uneven ground and uncomfortable prickly bushes".

George Lambert (Kent, United Kingdom, 1700 - Covent Garden, London, 30 November 1765) was an English landscape artist and theatre painter. He is considered a pioneer of the British landscape in art.