Lynton Lamb

Lynton Lamb wrote three letters to Ruth Borchard, all dated 1963, from Rose Cottage, Sandon, Chelmsford. In the first, he writes: 'What a delightful idea! I did a self-portrait about two years ago but I do not like it very much, so will not offer it to you. But I have a 12” x 10” canvas that I am rather fond of done in 1938 that you might find recognisably in the Euston Road manner since I was then closely associated with Pasmore, Graham Bell and Claude Rogers. It is a bit dusty after all these years, but I can clean it up and send it to you to see if you like it. But if you think it too small, I am likely to do another some time soon.' The second letter acknowledges that he has sent off the 1938 self-portrait. In the third, he thanks Ruth for 'your kind letter and cheque for £21 in payment for the self-portrait [...] Dusting it down, varnishing and battening it after all these years has been quite an experience: and as you say the beginning of later developments is to be found in it.'

Lamb's self-portrait is, as he intimates, a quintessentially Euston Road School work of art, and quite close in technique, tone and feeling to William Coldstream's pictures. In 1936, Coldstream had written, 'I've got a craze for doing heads and faces', and over the next two years he painted a series of what he called 'straight' pictures – based on his own working method of plotting horizontal and vertical co-ordinates on the canvas – of figures such as the writers W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Lamb's self-portrait seems similarly closely measured-up and co-ordinated. It is based predominantly on masses of thin, vertical brushstrokes accumulated  so as to correspond with the physical masses of upper body and head, set against a freely scumbled, muddy ochre and olive background. Lamb's lips and cheeks seem highly coloured in contrast to the somewhat murky colours of the rest of the painting; this theatrical high colour seems less the flush of good health than of nervous sensitivity. The neatly-attired Lamb looks at us askance. As in Coldstream and Pasmore's contemporaneous portraits, the eyes are softly painted, not hard-edged. Lamb's quivering gaze seems at once aloof and introspective, diffident in the stereotypically reserved English male manner of the day. The scarlet flourish of his signature at bottom right does stand out as a unique accent, a full-blooded highlight. This is a man evidently of hidden reserves and rare perspicacity.

Lynton Lamb was born in Hyderabad in India in 1907, the son of a Methodist minister; he grew up in London and was educated at a school in Bath, Somerset. After his father’s death he found himself compelled to work in an estate agent’s office but was able to attend evening classes in life drawing under Randolph Schwabe (1885-1948) at Camberwell School of Art. From 1928-30, he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where his painting tutors included William Roberts (1895-1980) and Bernard Meninsky (1891-1950), and where he studied wood engraving under Noel Rooke (1881-1953) and R.J. Beedham (1879-1975). Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) was a fellow student and close friend. After leaving the Central, Lamb and Pasmore shared a studio for some time, the latter depicting Lamb as the 'elegant gentleman in the homburg' in his 1936-37 painting The Parisian Café (Collection: City of Manchester Art Galleries). Indeed, some early prints by Lamb show an affinity with Pasmore's paintings of their local neighbourhood, Chiswick, in south-west London.

From October 1937 to the summer of 1939 a 'School of Drawing and Painting', whose founding teachers were Rogers, Pasmore and Coldstream, operated first at 12 Fitzroy Street, London W1, and from February 1938 at 314/6 Euston Road. This was soon designated as the 'Euston Road School'. In a letter dated March 1942, the painter Graham Bell included Lynton Lamb's name among a list of 25 artists whom he believed had played an integral part in the school's development.

Bell described 'The Euston School' as 'an amorphous cluster with one week three or four members and a week later twenty or thirty [...] The name Euston School was given to the group by Clive Bell [in a November 1938 review] The name was never sought by the artists concerned, and for a time was actively disliked, but it was apposite and it stuck. It gave the address of the art school and at the same time conveyed to the mind an impression of fog and murk, dingy colours and inconclusive architecture, drabness and poverty, which were the qualities first to be associated with the works exhibited by these artists [...] So there it is, flattering in its inference of descent from Camden Town, reproachful with its association of soot and drizzle, a name to shelter under and which at the same time (since it came unasked) there is no need to defend.'

Lamb taught at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1950-71, and at the Royal College of Art from 1956-71. His style shifted noticeably over the years. His wood engraving Heart's Desire (c.1933) – portraying a tall, slender, angelic-winged young man tip-toeing about in a geometricised skyscape – relates to contemporary prints by artists such as Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983) and Blair Hughes-Stanton (1902-1981), which semi-Surrealistically celebrate 'the human form divine'. A wartime lithograph, showing two soldiers driving in The Staff Car (c.1941), is a witty, semi-literal back view of two rather self-important military types. By the late 1940s, the influence of Bonnard and Vuillard was uppermost.

He is remembered today mainly for his work as a book illustrator – during his lifetime about forty books illustrated by Lamb were published. For countless readers, their experience of the novels of Trollope or Flaubert's Madame Bovary, or George Eliot's Silas Marner, became inseparable from Lamb's intensely researched, elegant illustrations. Today, those rummaging in second-hand bookshops frequently encounter his black-and-white-and-one-colour jackets made for the World's Classics Series. Perhaps his finest illustrative achievement was the unpublished wood engravings he made for a projected Penguin edition (in 1937) of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Urne Buriall, which depict subjects such as Pyramids, arches, obelisks; Tavern music and Bees, ants, spiders with superb linear economy and delightful, wry wit.

Lamb always insisted that his illustrative skills were firmly underpinned by his gifts as a painter. He disagreed with his friend Edward Ardizonne, who believed that a 'born illustrator' was more excited by the printed word than by reality. Lamb, who instead always depended on his own close, direct, painterly observation of reality (an approach fostered by his Euston Road School training), insisted that 'Illustration is not an inexhaustible spring of invention; it is a channel for the living stream. Painting is the source of our graphic tradition, and no revival of illustrated books can survive without tapping that source.' His skill, colourist subtlety and psychological acuity as painter are evident in his portrait of his wife Bridget, Biddy, Mrs Lynton Lamb (1950s; Collection: Chelmsford Museum Store) – whom he met when she was an art student and who gave up her own painting career to bring up a family. Here she is depicted as a lean, intense figure of enigmatic gravity, elegant in a luminous white robe or dress as she sits on a Windsor chair before the mantelpiece: a picture conveying an atmosphere of dignified domestic happiness. Lynton Lamb died in 1977.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004