The portrait of Mollie Courtauld is a preparatory study for a larger commission of Mollie with her two young children. Mollie met Augustine Courtauld on the Cambridge Spring Ball Circuit and married into one of Britain’s most celebrated families and founders of the renowned Courtauld Institute of Art. Augustine, or August, was a British Arctic Explorer and before their wedding spent a year as solo meteorologist of the winter observation post, Icecap Station in Greenland. Their life together followed a similarly adventurous route; mountain climbing in Greenland, sailing in Scotland and Norway, and spending their honeymoon camel-trekking in remote Sudan. After August died of multiple sclerosis in 1959, Mollie married Rab Butler, the Conservative Home Secretary and later Foreign Secretary. In 1988, six years after Rab died, Mollie wrote Rab and August, chronicling the family, travel and politics of her married life.

It is less typical of his society portraits at this time; her sloping shoulders and long neck lead up to her face which is turned away from the viewer- she appears relaxed, lost in thought. In the full composition she is reading to her son and daughter. This slight exaggeration of her features, the elongated neck and rounded shoulders, do appear in his paintings of other young socialites and beautiful aristocratic women.

Henry Lamb RA (1883 – 1960)  was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1883 shortly before his father moved the family to Manchester having taken a post in the Mathematics department of Manchester University. He grew up in Manchester as one of seven children to Professor Horace Lamb and his wife, Mary. He first studied medicine before abandoning his studies to be an artist. Aged twenty two he left for London to study under Augustus John and William Orpen at their short-lived Chelsea Art School. John was particularly formative in those early years and it was with John that Lamb moved to Paris a few years later. Once back in London Lamb joined the Fitzroy group and was a founding member of both The Camden Town Group and The London Group. The eminent critic and biographer Lytton Strachey was a good friend and between 1912 and 1914 sat for a portrait that would become one of Lamb’s greatest works. It now resides in the Tate and was described by Sir John Rothenstein as “one of the best portraits painted in England in this century”. With the outbreak of the first world war Lamb returned to his study of medicine and served as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, Salonika and Palestine where he was awarded the Military Cross. He was not an official war artist but was always sketching and drawing in spare moments. In 1928 he married Lady Pansy Pakenham and moved to the quiet Wiltshire village of Coombe Bissett where they would remain for the rest of their lives. Lamb was appointed an official war artist for the second world war. At the same time as his appointment as a war artist Lamb was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy and a Trustee of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. He was finally awarded full membership of the Royal Academy in 1949.