The Detached Observer

Peyton Skipwith applauds this long-overdue reassessment of the work of Henry Lamb

HENRY LAMB (1883– 1960) is an important figure in the history of early-20th-century British painting, but he is better known for individual works, such as his portrait of Lytton Strachey, than for the totality of his oeuvre. The fault is largely his for, as with his elder contemporary William  Rothstein, Lamb’s early precociousness became swamped by a rather stultifying seriousness, with the result that his later works tend to be worthy, rather than inspired. With Rothstein, this pall descended during a visit to India in 1912, but for  Lamb, it probably had more to do with his other discipline, medicine, and the after-effects of being gassed in the First World War.

Lamb was by nature detached; his daughter, Felicia, describes him in the Messums catalogue as ‘nervous as a cat’ and Harry Moore-Gwyn, curator of the Salisbury show and author of its catalogue, notes Lamb’s abhorrence of ‘the idea of being swept up by any movement or assumed discipleship of any artist’. Dora Carrington graphically described him as ‘looking like an army doctor who has seen “life” perhaps on the Tibet frontier or who has suffered from low fevers in Sierra Leone and also has a past murder, or crime, which makes him furtive and uneasy’.