Height overall: 30cm (11.8in)
Patinated bronze. Signed and dated ‘ML A/P [artist’s proof] 1938’ on the base. Raised on an integral bronze base. Height of head: 21cm (8.2in).
The present bust was created in 1938, when Churchill, out of office and favour, fulfilled his contractual obligations to his publisher with the fourth and final volume of his ‘Life of Marlborough’. It was the year of ‘The Gathering Storm’ and it began with the resignation of Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary in protest to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Fascist Italy - a policy which Chamberlain was extending towards Hitler. Churchill warned the government against appeasement and called for collective action to deter German aggression. Following the Anschluss, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons: “A country like ours, possessed of immense territory and wealth, whose defence has been neglected, cannot avoid war by dilating upon its horrors, or even by a continuous display of pacific qualities, or by ignoring the fate of the victims of aggression elsewhere. War will be avoided, in present circumstances, only by the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor.”
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Maurice Prosper Lambert RA (1901-1964) was the son of the artist George Washington Lambert and the older brother of the composer and author Constant Lambert. He served a five year apprenticeship under F. Derwent Wood when working on the Machine Gun Corps memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Lambert first exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, Regent Street in 1925. In 1930 he joined the London Group, and the avant-garde 7 & 5 Society. In 1932 his small, minimalist alabaster sculpture 'Swan' was acquired by the Tate. Lambert made portrait busts of the artistic figures of the day including, Edith Sitwell, Stephen Tennant, and William Walton. He received commissions to create sculptures for transatlantic liners. For the RMS Queen Mary he produced a fifty foot long frieze ‘Sport & Speed’, still extant abroad the ship at Long Beach, California. His project for the RMS Queen Elizabeth in 1939 was interrupted by outbreak of war. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1938 and was elected as Associate in 1941. His career however was interrupted by the war in which he served as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Lambert was master of the RA sculpture school from 1950 until 1952, the year he was elected as an Academician. He chose as his Diploma Work a beguiling 1937 piece, grounded in classicism but displaying ‘a step removed from modern sculptural practice of the 1930s’, titled ‘Carving in Paros Marble’, yet he remains best known for his statues, such as his life-sized likeness of ballerina Margot Fonteyn and his equestrian portrait of George V.
Ref: Nicolson, Vanessa (2002) ’The sculpture of Maurice Lambert’, Panourgias, Klio K.
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/carving-in-paros-marble