Watercolour and gouache over pencil, 26 by 37.5 cm (10 ¼ by 14 ¾ ins)

Lamb met the Russian-born mosaicist Boris Anrep when the two artists were students at the Academie Julien in Paris in 1908. The portrait he painted of Anrep and his family in 1920 would be the first in a series of ambitious group portraits that would define much of his work in the early 1920s. They are arguably amongst his finest and most individual works. The highly unconventional composition of Lamb’s portrait hints at the intrinsic awkwardness of the Anrep’s marriage (Helen Anrep would leave Boris in 1925 to live with Roger Fry, partly on account of Anrep’s mistress Marouska Volkova whose figure appears in the distance to the right of this study). This is one of at least three finished colour studies for the final painting which Lamb sold to the Museum of Fine Art in Boston in 1932. The family dog appears to the right of the picture (although it was omitted from the final painting) as does Anrep’s mosaicist’s hammer (on the chair to his right). Anrep would later go on to complete fine work in mosaic in the National Gallery, the Bank of England and Westminster Cathedral.