19 Facts About Henry Lamb

Henry Taylor Lamb was an Australian-born British painter.

Henry Lamb was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 21 June 1883, the son of Sir Horace Lamb, who was the professor of mathematics at Adelaide University.

When Horace Henry Lamb was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1885 the family moved back to England.

Henry Lamb was educated at Manchester Grammar School, before studying medicine at Manchester University Medical School and Guy's Hospital in London, but Lamb abandoned medicine in 1906 to study painting at the Chelsea School of Art, then run by William Orpen and Augustus John.

In 1907, Henry Lamb studied at the Academie de La Palette in Paris, an art academy where the painters Jean Metzinger, Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier taught.

Henry Lamb met his future wife Nina Forrest in 1905 during the final term of his medical studies in Manchester and they ran away to London together that summer.

The relationship was short-lived, but they did not divorce until 1927 shortly before Henry Lamb married Pansy Pakenham.

In 1908,1910 and 1911 Henry Lamb worked in Brittany, where he painted his most famous work, Death of a Peasant.

At the start of World War One, Henry Lamb returned to his medical studies and qualified as a doctor at Guy's Hospital.

Henry Lamb saw active service in the First World War in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a battalion medical officer with the 5th Battalion, The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and was awarded the Military Cross.

Henry Lamb served in Palestine and on the Western Front and was badly gassed not long before the end of the war.

In February 1918, before he was demobilised, Henry Lamb was approached by British War Memorials Committee of the Ministry of Information to produce a large painting for a proposed national Hall of Remembrance.

Henry Lamb is noted for his unusual portraits, as exemplified by his well-known picture of an elongated Lytton Strachey.

Henry Lamb was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1940 and was made a full Member in 1949.

Henry Lamb was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1942 and of the Tate Gallery from 1944 to 1951.

Henry Lamb married Lady Pansy Pakenham, a daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford, in 1928, and they had a son and two daughters, including the landscape gardener Henrietta Phipps, and the journalist Valentine Henry Lamb.

Henry Lamb died on 8 October 1960 at the Spire Nursing Home in Salisbury, Wiltshire at the age of 77.

The character and appearance of the composer Lewis Dodd in Margaret Kennedy's The Constant Nymph was based on Henry Lamb, who was a gifted pianist.

Henry Lamb's nephew was the climatologist Hubert Lamb and his great-nephew was the Liberal Democrat politician Norman Lamb.