Charles Lamb was one of the leading landscape and figurative painters of twentieth-century Ireland, best known for his depictions of life on the west coast, particularly the fishermen, boats and coastal scenes of Connemara and Carraroe on Galway Bay.
He entered the painting section of the art competitions at two Olympic Games. At Los Angeles 1932 he submitted 'A Galway Fisherman', one of nine exhibits entered by eight Irish artists at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. At London 1948 his entry was 'Curragh Races, Connemara', shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The son of a house painter, Lamb followed his father's trade before taking evening classes at the Belfast School of Art and winning a scholarship to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where he trained from 1917 to 1921. He built a house at Carraroe in 1935 and ran an annual exhibition and a summer painting school there, travelling widely in Ireland and in Brittany. His large paintings of fishermen and their currachs, the light boats of the Connemara coast, were produced in the late 1940s and 1950s and are among his best known works.
In 1940 the critic Thomas Bodkin named him among twelve artists central to the development of a distinct modern school of Irish painting, and in 1949 he created illustrations for the Irish-language novel 'Cré na Cille'. His work is held in most major Irish public collections.
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