Charles Lamb RHA RUA (1893-1964) The Egg Seller Oil on canvas, 60 x 50cm (24 x 20''). Provenance: From the Collection of the artist's daughter Mary Waugh. Exhibited: ''Spring Exhibition'', The...

Charles Lamb RHA RUA (1893-1964) The Egg Seller Oil on canvas, 60 x 50cm (24 x 20''). Provenance: From the Collection of the artist's daughter Mary Waugh. Exhibited: ''Spring Exhibition'', The Frederick Gallery, March 1999, catalogue no 28, where purchased by the current owner. A son of a house painter from Portadown, Co. Armagh, Lamb studied at the College of Art where he flourished under the tuition of Patrick Tuohy, Margaret Clark, and Se?n Keating. Like his teachers, Keating and Tuohy, Lamb painted people directly on their own with an empasis on drama using studio light with distinctive attention to material surfaces of fabric with horizontal strokes of pigment. In the 1920's Lamb toured the West of Ireland on horseback, visiting Carraroe in the South of Connemara on the coast of Galway Bay. Like Paul Henry, who visited Achill in the early 1900's, both were enthralled by the landscape, language and the daily lives of the people who were living in a remote world with endless boreens, high granite walls leading to silent turf bogs, and deserted beaches.. Other Northern artists were to follow to the area, Frank McKelvey, James Hubert Craig, and Gerard Dillon, a world away from their own to a pure, simple and primitive lifestyle that inspired Lamb to finally settle in the area for the rest of his life. In most of his paintings of people in Connemara, Lamb uses simple techniques with single objects to record the lives of an old rural Ireland. Using back lighting, Lamb's typical brushwork empasis the sitter's face and the texture of her shawl with strong horizontal and diagonal strokes. As seen in ''Turf Cutter'' and ''Connemara Woman'' both sold in these salerooms, the sitter's hands are placed on the item of importance. In 'Turf Cutter'' the man hold onto a Slane, in''Connemara Woman,'' the eldery woman's hands clasp a stick with rosary beads, and in ''Egg Seller'' the sitter carrys a basket. 'Egg money' was the only money which a woman could call her own, a Slane was a man's livlihood , and in solitude, a stick with rosary beads acted as support and comfort in old age.

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