Across the Black Soil Plains
George W. Lambert (1873 to 1930) · 1899
A long, low canvas shows a team of fourteen horses straining to drag a wool laden wagon through deep black mud under a low grey sky. The teamster walks beside them with his whip, the wheels are buried to the hub, and the whole line of animals leans into the harness so that you feel the weight of the load in your own shoulders. There is no horizon to speak of, only the plain, the mud and the effort. It is the great Australian picture of work as heroism.
Lambert was twenty six and had never been west of the mountains when he painted it, working from sketches made on a trip to the Warren district of New South Wales and from horses he studied in Sydney. The black soil plains are the heavy clay country of the north west that turns to glue after rain, and the wool wagons of the 1890s were the trucks of their day. Look at the anatomy of the horses, each one different in colour and attitude, and at the frieze like composition, which lets you read the team from the leaders at the left to the wagon at the right like a sentence.
The painting won the Wynne Prize in 1899 and was bought by the gallery the same year, launching a career that took Lambert to Paris, London and the Western Front as an official war artist. It is hung in the Grand Courts among the other Australian pictures of the 1890s, and it makes a telling contrast with the sunlit landscapes of Streeton and the domestic quiet of McCubbin: this is the interior, hard, wet and heavy, and the people in it are working.
Did You Know? Lambert painted the scene from sketches and studio horses before he had ever seen the black soil country himself.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.