George Lambert, Group portrait, 1908 by Natasja Tollenaar

About "George Lambert, Group portrait, 1908"

by Natasja Tollenaar

About the artwork

In his images of women and children, Lambert presented a masculine view of the world of women and children. In Portrait Group, more than in any other family portrait group, Lambert showed the mother as voluptuous, dressed in a hat with wide-brimmed feathers and a voluminous dress revealing her naked shoulders. It is perhaps the most sensual image of his wife Amy that Lambert painted.

On another level, Lambert conveyed sibling rivalry, with the eldest child wearing riding clothes and sitting on a pony, driven out of the mother's attention by the naked younger child. He also suggested that the male power (the eldest child representing the father) is removed from the mother yet overlooks the mother.

As with his other portrait groups, Lambert placed his figures in an imaginary romantic landscape rather than an outdoor naturalistic setting, and used Amy and his children, Maurice and Constant, as his models. He tried to create a decorative effect, striking a balance between the realism of his rendering of the figures and the stylised design of the landscape and the group's placement in it. He deliberately placed dark shapes against the light and tried to arrange the boy's back on the horse so that the curve of his back followed the curve of his mother. To some extent, his careful pose of the figures and their hushed gaze give them a sense of artificiality - just like the elaborate costume worn by the mother.

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 British landscape in art.