Dimensions: support: 2445 x 1784 mm frame: 2525 x 1870 x 75 mm
Copyright: © Tate | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: This is Henry Lamb's portrait of Lytton Strachey, a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group. Lamb, who lived from 1885 to 1960, captured Strachey in an intimate setting, revealing a complex character study. Editor: Gosh, it feels like a stage set, doesn't it? The way he's posed, the almost aggressively autumnal palette, the gloom pressing in at the windows...it's all very deliberate. Curator: Indeed. The window, acting as a grid, divides nature and the domestic interior, creating a tension. Strachey’s hands, clasped around the wicker chair, seem to signify a holding onto something, perhaps control? Editor: Or maybe just trying to get comfy! But I see what you mean about that controlled unease. It’s like he's both present and absent at once, absorbed in his own interior landscape that we can't access. Curator: Lamb uses symbols to speak of Strachey's intellectual nature, but I wonder, what future interpretations will viewers bring? Editor: Maybe we should all carry our own wicker chairs. It definitely gives a certain *je ne sais quoi* to even a dark forest.
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Giles Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a critic and biographer who established a reputation with his book 'Eminent Victorians', published in 1918. He was one of the members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, which included the writer Virginia Woolf and the painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Lamb painted a small portrait of Strachey in his studio in the Vale of Health, Hampstead in 1912, and then painted this grand larger version two years later. Strachey once said that he was unable to lift a match before breakfast and this portrait shows him in a typically languid pose. Gallery label, August 2004
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