William Lamb (artist)

William Lamb was a Scottish artist born on June 1, 1893. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to his older brother James as a stone mason and monumental sculptor. During his apprenticeship, Lamb attended continuation classes at Montrose Academy and was encouraged by his art teacher, Lena Gaudie.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Lamb enlisted with the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders and fought in Belgium and France. He was wounded twice and eventually invalided out of the army with extensive damage to his right hand. Undeterred by this trauma, Lamb attended Edinburgh College of Art where he taught himself to draw, paint and sculpt with his left hand.

Lamb stayed for only two years in Edinburgh then left for France, finding the discipline of academia frustrating. He left Paris to embark on a cycle tour of France and Italy.

The Scottish Renaissance

In 1924 Lamb returned to his native Montrose to set up his first studio above the shop of George Cathro, a painter and decorator in Bridge Street. Through Cathro, Lamb became involved with a group of young artists and literati who believed in the idea of a Scottish Renaissance in life and the arts. This group included the Angus poet Violet Jacob, the painter Edward Baird, C. M. Grieve (Hugh McDiarmid), then a reporter with the Montrose Review and George Fairweather, an architect. In this stimulating atmosphere, Lamb experienced a burst of creativity producing hundreds of etchings, drawings and sculpture. In 1925, Lamb had works accepted in three prestigious exhibitions: The Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Academy, London, and the Paris Salon.

The Royal Sculptures

In 1932 Lamb was commissioned by the Duchess of York, a native of Angus, to model portrait heads of her daughters, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. Impressed by his skill, the Duchess also commissioned Lamb to produce a portrait of herself. These works are on display in the William Lamb Studio.

The Lamb Studio

When Lamb returned from London, he had his friend, George Fairweather, draw up plans for the studio in Market Street, financing the project with the money from his Royal commissions and doing much of the internal work in the studio himself.

Throughout the next thirty-four years, the studio would be the centre of Lamb’s life, the place where he would put together the vast range of etchings, drawings, watercolours and sculptures in clay, plaster, wood, stone and bronze.

William Lamb died in 1951 and it was his wish that the studio should be left as his memorial gift.

On William Lamb’s death in 1951, following his deathbed wishes, Miss Caroline Lamb, his sister passed the studio and its contents to Montrose Town Council. The building was laid out as a permanent exhibition of William Lamb’s work and opened in 1955 as a memorial to him, one of Scotland’s greatest sculptors.

The Studio is open to the public in the summer months and at other times by arrangement with the curator of Montrose Museum.

Artistic Influences

Lamb’s work has been influenced by two main sources. The first is undoubtedly his stay in France and his absorption of the work of Rosso and other similar impressionist sculptors. The second is his love of the working people of his native Montrose and Angus. A career as a successful fashionable portrait sculptor based in Edinburgh or London was open to him as his early portrait commissions indicate, but he spurned this opportunity to return to his home in Montrose and to a Spartan existence with a few kindred spirits to keep him company. Certainly the town of Montrose, while tolerating him never accorded him the respect which his outstanding work merited. Lamb’s early portrait sculpture shows an incisive ability far above the average work shown in the galleries and exhibitions.

It is perhaps in his woodcarving that Lamb emerges most clearly as an individual character among sculptors. Here in those magnificent works he weaves several threads together to produce a series of sculptures perhaps as fine if not finer than anything produced in Scotland this century. Those influences show that Lamb was far from being an unsophisticated talent. The works in wood show the influence of Art Nouveau writhings in the swirling draperies of his female figures caught in the wind as in "Gale Force".

William Lamb was a man who gave all to his art. Worldly success and the politics of art interested him not at all. He may be revealed now as one of the few original minds in Scottish art of this century.