Charles Lamb RHA RUA (1893-1964) A Connemara Woman (1932) Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 49.5cm (23.5 x 19.5''). Signed Exhibited: The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork ''Gendering Irish Landscape'' September...

Charles Lamb RHA RUA (1893-1964) A Connemara Woman (1932) Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 49.5cm (23.5 x 19.5''). Signed Exhibited: The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork ''Gendering Irish Landscape'' September -November 2006 Ulster Artists Exhibition, the AVA Gallery, Clandeboye, April 2010, catalogue no. 18 Having trained in the Metropolitan School of Art, Lamb had ingested the Orpenesque treatment of the Human figure and particularly the face and what were known as the extremities (hands and feet). Using front lighting and powerful backlight, which gave an overspill to create double lighting on the face, the woman stares at the viewer. It is the kind of compositional divide with Patrick Tuohy a first generation Orpen student and an early teacher of Lamb used to great and telling effect. The Woman is clad in the traditional shawls, a head shawl, a shoulder shawl crossed over the chest and tied around the waist and the outdoors shawl. Lamb used these shawled figures to great effect in his work, and this is the same woman he portrays in the painting in the Crawford Gallery in Cork, ''A Quaint Couple'' although in this latter work the woman is rather more benign. She 's wearing the same clothing as in this work. The other element that is so characteristic of Orpen's influence is the way in which the hands are articulated. Deriving from Orpen the hands are fully flexed or turned to give expression to the figure, as the scale of hands and feet can be crucial to understanding the physical type represented and their emotional context as well. The halation of light behind the seated figure contra posed against a brilliantly lit background is more than just a trick, it is a way of giving a visual dart of energy to the background and forces the figure well into the foreground for the viewer's attention, making a grand declamatory statement in purely pictorial terms. The brilliant highlights on the wedding ring, the beads, the neck of the walking stick and upwards to the face and the background is a tracking device to keep the eye focused on the face and central to the compositional devices as imparted by the painter. Her is a Peasant woman, in the French sense of attached to the land, tough pugnacious, shrewd and observant. This masterly and powerful portrait is of a Carraroe Woman, still exuding great power and authority, in decline but a handsome and challenging figure. Ciaran MacGonigal

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