George Washington Julian

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Lambert, George Washington (1873–1930). Australian painter. He was born in St Petersburg, the son of an American engineer who had been working on railway construction in Russia (he died three month's before his child's birth). After spending his early years in Russia and Germany, he was educated in England and in 1887 moved to Australia to work on a farm owned by his mother's uncle. He studied in Sydney under Julian Ashton (1851–1942), one of the leading Australian art teachers of the day, and in 1900 won a scholarship to Paris. From 1902 to 1921 he lived in England. His early work in Australia had included scenes of bush life and illustrations for books and magazines, but in England he turned mainly to portraiture in a painterly style similar to that of Augustus John or Orpen. During the First World War he went to Egypt and Gallipoli to make paintings for Australian War Records. In 1921 he returned to Australia and settled in Sydney, where he became ‘the arbiter of “progressive” taste … he was, at the age of forty-seven, at the height of his career, a man of unusual energy and great personal charm … Although a skilled exponent of academic methods he saw himself as a champion of youth and was not intolerant of modernist experiments providing they were not “excessive”’ ( Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1990, 1991). In 1926 he founded the Contemporary Group in Sydney. He continued to work mainly as a portrait and figure painter, but in his final years he also took up sculpture. He was the father of the composer Constant Lambert and the sculptor Maurice Lambert.

George Washington Julian , 1817–99, American abolitionist, U.S. Representative from Indiana (1849–51, 1861–71), b. Wayne co., Ind. Elected to the Indiana legislature as a Whig in 1845, he later became prominent in the Free-Soil party and in 1849 was sent to Congress by a coalition of Free-Soilers and Democrats. There he continued his radical antislavery activities. In 1852 the Free-Soil party nominated him for Vice President on the ticket with John P. Hale. He joined the Republican party at the time of its formation and in 1861 returned to Congress, where he became chairman of the committee on public lands and a member of the committees on the conduct of the war, on Reconstruction, and on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. In 1872 he joined the Liberal Republican party and after its demise was associated with the Democratic party. From 1885 to 1889 he was surveyor general of New Mexico by appointment of President Cleveland.

Bibliography: See published collections of his speeches; biography by P. W. Riddleberger (1966).