Culture vultures including Sir Peter O’Sullevan described Elie Lambert as the LS Lowry of the racing world and an upcoming exhibition of the Belgian artist’s work has particular poignancy as it opens just a few months after his death.
More than 40 paintings will be on display and available for purchase at the Osborne Studio Gallery in London from April 2 to 26 in something of a celebration of a one-off character whose paintings began as an adjunct to a life immersed in horseracing and eventually became by far his most acknowledged talent.
Lambert, who died aged 75 in November, grew up around horses and began riding as an amateur as a teenager, but had been interested enough in art to attend the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
He would become a bloodstock agent, sourcing horses for the likes of Martin Pipe, Ron Smyth and Geoff Huffer, reported for the likes of Paris-Turf and The Sporting Life, and was an antiques dealer.
Art remained a hobby for Lambert, who would make sketches of horses in sales catalogues, and while he was undergoing treatment for cancer in the 1980s he found that painting was a therapeutic part of his recovery.
His widow, Danielle Bout, explains the serendipitous way in which he became a commercial hit relatively late in life.
“He would come with antiques in his little van to London every month and had a few lots to sell with Christie’s in Kensington,” she says.
Black Caviar, oil on panelCredit: Osborne Studio Gallery
“There was a man there, Tom Rooth, who would say what he wanted to have and what he didn’t want. He’d take some things, then one day he said, ‘What’s this painting? I’ll take this too’.
“Elie said, ‘No, no, that’s nothing’. It was one of his paintings. But he took it. A year and a half later we had a nice cheque for this painting. That started it.”
Rooth, head of the sporting art department at the world-famous auction house, recalled in his foreword to the exhibition that he returned to his office one day and found two more of Lambert’s paintings awaiting examination.
At first, Lambert would paint in his wife’s living room while she was out managing a hotel; it was only late in life that there was a more harmonious solution of his own studio when they moved to Deauville, close to Haras de Meautry.
With Rooth one of Lambert’s champions, his work began to achieve a following around 20 years ago. Geoffrey Hughes, director of the Osborne Studio Gallery, was alerted to it.
“Someone said to me I should go and look at them because they were so individual, Lowryesque, with no bridles and saddles, but they really worked,” says Hughes.
“I managed to track Elie down and he invited me over to Belgium, where he and Danielle were living. He was a bon viveur, we had a great weekend, and became friends from then on. What I loved was that his style was so different to anybody else but he knew horses really well.”
Ascot, oil on canvasCredit: Osborne Studio Gallery
The Lowry comparison owes to the matchstick style of his figures in the crowd at racecourses all around Europe. Lambert’s horses are long-legged beasts that dwarf their trainers, with comically miniature jockeys aboard them, thought to have been conceived from how he viewed racing as a child. He was known for a bold use of primary colours, especially the vivid greens he used for the turf, and his work was intended to charm.
“There is not much philosophy in my work,” Lambert once said. “I just capture a moment of intense happiness to be alive, surrounded by the generous nature of our racecourses, stud farms, and the beauty of the horse.”
Hughes and Bout do not believe one of the 20th century titans was a direct inspiration, nor was his own art a homage to Lowry, for all that he was rightly pleased with the comparison.
“I think it was just the way it developed,” says Hughes of Lambert’s style. “He loved Picasso too. Growing up, he disliked the rather dour Flemish school of paintings, and he really had a reaction to that. He wanted to paint things that made people smile and his palette was very bright. I’ve seen people look at them and there’s always that happy feeling.”
Figures from racing rank among Lambert’s fans, but among the biggest appears to be the South African hotelier Bea Tollman, founder of the luxury Red Carnation group. A collection of the paintings hang publicly in the Milestone Hotel in Kensington.
“There was a customer at Christie’s who always bought Elie’s paintings by phone,” recalls Bout. “They wouldn’t say who the buyer was, but after Christie’s in South Kensington was closed, we found out they were all in the Milestone. The lady must have bought certainly 20 of them from there, and a few others as well.”
Essential reading: ‘and me, governor?’ by Elie Lambert (does not feature in exhibition)Credit: Elie Lambert
It was only when his eyesight began to fail that Lambert slowed down. He painted prolifically, but somewhat unconventionally.
Bout says: “He had a special tactic. He’d take one fresh canvas, he’d paint for one day and then it must be gone so the oil could be left to dry.
“He sometimes had eight or ten paintings at the same time. He’d say this one no, it’s shining and I don’t want it, then this one yes. He actually had paintings he started one year and that he finished ten years later. So I’ve still got more than 50 paintings that he started and hadn’t finished.”
His paintings run across the gamut of the turf, from Derby day, Newmarket Heath and glamorous Chantilly to scenes from now-defunct Folkestone, where Bout explained he would often go on the hunt for horses.
“He was the first bloodstock agent in Belgium who imported horses from England, that was from 1973 to 1985,” she says.
“He had many connections in England and the first horses he bought were from selling races at Folkestone. When you bought a horse in England that wasn’t very good, it was still good enough for Belgium. When the horseracing in Belgium went down because there was no money any more, he bought horses to run in England.”
Geoffrey Hughes is showing the exhibition at the Osborne Studio Gallery
Bout explains that his painting was also entirely from memory.
“Never photographs,” she says. “He said he could view a painting directly and when he bought a horse he said he knew it perfectly, all his tendons, his muscles. A vet once said to him, ‘Elie you know a horse even with your eyes closed, and with your hands you feel what is right and what isn’t’.”
Hughes has exhibited Lambert’s paintings only a handful of times down the years and is proud that this planned showing will still go ahead.
An Anglophile who was known to have slept in his van in the car park at Glorious Goodwood, Lambert has ended up with a rich legacy which stemmed from his original passion and will surely stand the test of time.
“Elie was preparing for the exhibition, he was 100 per cent on it and he’d have been delighted we’re doing it,” says Hughes. “The family felt after he died that they wanted it to go ahead, and it’ll be a really good tribute to his life.
“People remember them; he’s just got something. It’s a great thing in art to be good and to be different from everybody else, and he really is.”
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