Charles Lamb was one of the leading landscape and figurative painters of twentieth-century Ireland, best known for his vivid depictions of life on the west coast of Ireland – particularly the fishermen, boats and coastal scenes of Connemara and Carraroe on Galway Bay.

He competed in the painting section of the arts competition at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, one of eight Irish artists to enter nine exhibits at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. The son of a house painter, Lamb studied at his local Technical School before winning a scholarship to Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art, where he trained from 1917 to 1921 having attended evening classes at the Belfast School of Art.

He established a summer painting school and travelled extensively throughout Ireland as well as painting in Brittany, where he depicted Breton fishermen and peasants. The motif of the fisherman is a recurring and celebrated feature of his work, most famously in his series of large paintings of fishermen and their currachs – the distinctive light boats of the Connemara coast – produced in the late 1940s and 1950s. His work is held in most major Irish public museum collections.