Signed l.l.: Lamb/25

Oil on panel, 40 by 51 cm (15 ¾ by 20 ins)

Provenance: probably acquired from Lamb by his patron J.L.Behrend in the mid 1920s; sold to the previous owners at the Leicester Galleries in 1962

Exhibited: London, The Leicester Galleries, The J.L.Behrend Collection, May 1962, no.12

Lamb’s strong links with Cambridge began with visits to his brother Walter whilst the latter was an undergraduate there.  Later he would spend time in the city with his friend Lytton Strachey and as a more established artist he would become one of the painters of choice for Cambridge dons and college masters (this would include in 1926 a portrait of Lytton Strachey’s sister Joan Pernel Strachey who was Principal of Newnham College). Although appreciative of its architecture which he referred to as “much more beautiful than anything in Oxford”,  he also tired of numerous trips there and complained of “the old dons…grumbling and sighing”. The present landscape is a rare example of Lamb’s work in the city that took him beyond the drudgery of the portrait commission. It depicts the punt station off Mill Lane on a bend of the River Cam just beyond Queen’s College. At this date Lamb was living in Poole, a period that accounted for a small but fine group of cityscapes, many taken from the upper floor of his house in the heart of the old harbour and looking down on to its narrow streets below. This unusual viewpoint translated to the canvas producing an oblique quality in the perspective of his compositions that recalls the work of Stanley Spencer who was very close to Lamb at this date. There is a similar element to the perspective in the present painting, notably punctuated by the placing of the punts across the flat plane of the riverbank below.