Charles Lamb RHA RUA (1893-1964) The Turf Cutter Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 66cm (36 x 26'') Signed Provenance: From the collection of the artist's daughter Mary Waugh. From whom it was purchased...

Charles Lamb RHA RUA (1893-1964) The Turf Cutter Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 66cm (36 x 26'') Signed Provenance: From the collection of the artist's daughter Mary Waugh. From whom it was purchased privately by the present owner through the Frederick Gallery. Exhibited: The Frederick Gallery, Dublin November 1997, cat. no. 47, illustrated. Born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, the artist trained in the Belfast School of Art and then from 1917 at the Metropolitan School of Art where he was taught by Patrick Tuohy and Se?n Keating, both of them the former students of Sir William Orpen. It seems as if Tuohy and Keating reinforced Lamb's natural interest in and aptitude for single figures seen on an heroic scale. Always interested in the theories of painting especially those of the Barbizon School they seemed to support his own awareness of colour and the laws of complementary colours as set out by J.B. Chevreuil, a chemist who described the formula for what became known as Impressionism. Lamb's early work on the Aran Islands and then in South Connemara where he settled, reflect many of the Barbizon theories and when he painted many of the figures and landscapes around Lough Neagh it seemed the same kind of evocation or distillation of light seen through figurative landscape. This work dates from around the time of his great work the Lough Neagh Fisherman In the late 1920s or early '30s?the style is interesting in that he's using a modified form of pointillism to give an effect of the frieze material of the clothes worn by the subject in the long strokes of pigment laid down side by side deriving from the theories of Chevreuil which gives a sense of movement and immediacy to the subject who has his turf cutting spade known as a Slane which in turn gives the turf (peat) its characteristic surface appearance as well as a measurement of the sod, so that it could be accurately charted. It is also a left shouldered Slane, and that in turn gave rise in Northern Ireland to the phrase Left Footer, which has a basis in social descriptions of differences in communities. If there is an Orpenesque remnant it is in the direct expression of the subject, that long considering look at the onlooker(the artist) and the importance of the figure realised in full scale so that the background is there, incidental to but giving scale to the monumentality of the man busy about his important day's work. Additionally the figure is double lit from the front and from the background so that it propels the subject into our presence in a very compelling way. Ciar?n MacGonigal, December 2008

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