Born in Philadelphia to a prominent family, John Lambert, Jr., took an early interest in art which continued throughout his life. As a young boy, he traveled with his parents to Europe and England, and later enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After ten years of study, first as an artist, then as an architect, young Lambert turned to painting full-time, traveling to Paris to study at the Academie Julien in 1888. Upon his return to the United States three years later, he exhibited his work for the first time and established himself quickly as a portrait painter.

Portrait of Joseph Tuckerman Day was exhibited at the St Botolph Club in Boston the year it was painted, as well as in the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1899. Six years later, it was also included in the St Louis, Louisiana Purchase Exhibition. According to an 1898 review of the St. Botolph Club show: The portrait Is altogether delightful. This is a captivating little boy, with an expression of exuberant spirit and animation, and wearing a becoming suit of white with a beret on his head.

In addition to his work as a portrait painter Lambert left a significant legacy to the arts in Philadelphia. Upon his death in 1907, he willed $30,000 to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with instructions that it should be used by the institution to acquire works by undiscovered artists and "as far as possibie designate pictures by younger artists who have not yet made standard reputatiousn always choosing pictures of merit."2 According to a review of the Academy's 1938 exhibition of the LeLatbert purchases, the program represented "one of the most satisfying, and most successful, experiments in encouraging American art from the grass roots up."3 By 1961, the Lambert Fund had purchased over three-hundred pieces, including works by Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis and Charles Burchfield.

LISTED:
Who was Who in American Art
Mantle Fieldings
E. Benezit
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 1876-1913
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Chicago Art Institute 1888-1950
American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons

EXHIBITED:
Boston, St. Botolph Club, Exhibition of Paintings by John Lambert, Jr., November 21 -December 3, 1898 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, sixty-eighth Annual Exhibition, January 16-February 25, 1899
New York, Society of American Artists, twenty-first Annual Exhibition, April 1899
Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Twelfth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, November 6-December 17, 1899
St Louis, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904

LITERATURE:
"The Fine Arts," Boston Evening Transcript, November 26, 1898
"From the Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of the Society of American Artists," Harpers Weekly, April 1, 1899, p 310, illus. as Tuckerman Day
"John Lambert: The Making of an Artist," Old York Road Historical So

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton