George Lambert came to Australia as a teenager, by which time he had 'got this desire to do Art' and demonstrated prodigious talent in drawing. He worked as a jackeroo on his great-uncle's property near Gilgandra, New South Wales for several years before being advised to go to art school. He won the Wynne Prize in 1899, five years after starting classes at Julian Ashton's Sydney art school, and in 1900 he left for Europe having been awarded the NSW Society of Artists' Travelling Scholarship. He remained abroad until 1921, studying and working in Paris and London and serving as an official war artist with the Australian Imperial Force, in which role he created portraits and major depictions of events such as the Gallipoli landing.
Self portrait with gladioli, arguably the most definitive of Lambert's several self portraits, was painted after his return to Australia, and around the time he became the first – and thus far the only – Australian artist elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. A letter Lambert wrote to his wife Amy in November 1922 indicates that the portrait satirises the local perception of him as a foppish, artistic genius. 'I am a luxury, a hot house rarity … Despised for resembling a chippendale chair in a country where timber is cheap,' as he phrased it. In truth, Lambert was the complete antithesis of the fragile artist stereotype, and was once quoted as saying that he liked being told that he'd 'done his job well, as one might address a bricklayer'. Around the time he painted this portrait, he was suffering periodic attacks of malaria, which he contracted in Palestine in 1918, and of exhaustion brought on by his gruelling work schedule. Lambert's son Maurice later angrily described the painting as a 'brilliant piece of technique' with which his father 'disguised from the mediocre but revealed to the sensitive just what a few years in Australia had done to him'. The portrait was purchased by a private collector in 1923 for £1000 – the highest price paid for one of Lambert's works in his lifetime – and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1924. Lambert died from heart failure, aged 57, in May 1930.
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