In the later summer of 1903 John and Orpen rented two large rooms in the Rossetti Studios at 72 Flood Street, Chelsea, and opened an art school. As their prospectus explained, once a week they would teach classes in life drawing and painting, still life, figure composition, landscape and decorative painting. In return for an annual fee of nineteen guineas, prospective students were promised that they would, ‘by advice and suggestion,’ stimulate ‘the most personal artistic aims.’

Two years later, in the summer of 1905, a young medical student, Henry Lamb (1883–1960), abandoned his studies in Manchester and moved to London to train as an artist. Handsome and intelligent, Lamb soon proved himself a talented student, and he and John quickly became friends. For a while Lamb imitated John’s appearance—he grew his hair longer, and for a while sported a beard and gold earrings. He would also soon begin drawing like John. This portrait of John’s fourth son with Ida, born in Paris in 1905, shows Lamb’s closeness to his mentor, and his family. Well into the 1930s he would be a regular visitor to the John household, wherever it was located, and he developed a close attachment to Dorelia (with whom he had, for a while, an affair) and the children. One of Romilly John’s earliest memories was of being taken for walks by Lamb when they were staying at the Villa Ste Anne in Martigues, Provence, in the summer of 1910. Lamb is mentioned frequently and with fondness in Romilly’s 1932 memoir, Seventh Child. He liked all of the children, Romilly wrote, and encouraged them to draw. Lamb was a more stable character than their father who, as Romilly noted, was an ‘overwhelming’ personality.

According to Lamb’s biographer, Keith Clements, Lamb could never quite shake off the early influence of John on his drawing: even in the 1920s he would be complaining of a sketch getting ‘infected with something of Augustus’s brazenness.’ Although this drawing is dated to around 1912, there is perhaps something here reminiscent of Stanley Spencer’s graphic technique. Like John, Spencer had trained under Tonks at the Slade, where he was a student from 1908 to 1912. Lamb would meet Spencer for the first time late in 1913, and they became very close for a while.