Lamb first visited Donegal in 1912, and returned the following year. At just under 2,500 feet Errigal is a relatively small mountain but iconic nevertheless. During his time in Ireland Lamb made numerous pochades—small outdoor studies of the landscape on panel. The weather hampered his efforts, however. It was ‘hopelessly bad’, he wrote, and the poor light ‘makes it almost impossible to invent good colours.’

But by the spring of 1914 Lamb was emerging as a serious presence in the British art scene. In a review of the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s retrospective of twentieth century art held in May 1914, the critic Sir Claude Phillips picked him out for particular praise: ‘The art of Mr. Henry Lamb, unique in its combination of the decadent with the austere, is marked by an inventiveness, a nobility of design, with which nothing here can be paralleled.’ Then came the war, and Lamb would eventually enlist with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He would be gassed in France during the late stages of the conflict, and received the Military Cross for bravery shown in action in Palestine. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned by the government to paint a number of large official records. These—along with his earlier portrait of the writer Lytton Strachey, now in the Tate collection—are among his greatest works.