Lightly squared for transfer

Oil on canvas, 51 hy 40 cm

Exhibited: Salisbury Museum, Wiltshire, Henry Lamb - Out of the Shadows, May-September 2018, no.44

Literature: Harry Moore-Gwyn, Henry Lamb - Out of the Shadows, Paul Holberton, 2018, pp.104-105 (illustrated full page in colour p.105)

The present work is probably Lamb's final study for his ambitious family group The Artist's Family which he worked and re-worked from 1940 until 1943. The painting was eventually acquired by the Chantry Bequest and presented to the Tate gallery in 1961, a year after artist's death.

Depictions of the painter's own family are at the heart of Lamb's later work as an artist and he painted numerous portraits of his second wife Pansy, often idealising her role as a mother, as well as others studies of his three children, often at play. The Artist's Family is particularly rare in being a complete family group, one that also includes a self portrait. From left to right, the painting shows the artist's two daughters, Henrietta (b.1931) and Felicity (b.1933) with Pansy holding the couples' only son, Valentine (b.1939). Lamb himself is seated at a clavichord, his back enigimatically turned away from the viewer. It is a device he used elsewhere, most significantly in his 1926 painting The Tea Party (private collection) showing Stanley Spencer and other guests at Lamb's table in Poole.