Herbert Lambert, FRPS

Royal Photographic Society

The Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...

, (1881– 7 March 1936) was a British portrait photographer

Portrait photography

Portrait photography or portraiture is the capture by means of photography of the likeness of a person or a small group of people , in which the face and expression is predominant. The objective is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the subject...

 known for his portrayals of professional musicians and composers. In 1923, he published Modern British Composers: Seventeen Portraits in collaboration with Sir Eugene Goossens

Eugène Aynsley Goossens

Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer.-Biography:He was born in Camden Town, London, the son of the Belgian conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens and the grandson of the conductor Eugène Goossens...

, and in 1926, he became managing director of the Elliott & Fry

Elliott & Fry

Elliott & Fry was a Victorian photography studio and photographic film manufacturer, founded in 1863 by Joseph John Elliott and Clarence Edmund Fry. For a century the firm's core business was taking and publishing photographs of the Victorian public and social, artistic, scientific and political...

 portrait studio. In 1930, he published Studio portrait lighting, a technical guidebook. He is also responsible for salvaging much of the 19th-century photography of Henry Fox Talbot, by re-photographing the remains of Talbot's wet plates

Collodion process

The collodion process is an early photographic process. It was introduced in the 1850s and by the end of that decade it had almost entirely replaced the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype. During the 1880s the collodion process, in turn, was largely replaced by gelatin dry...

.

In addition to photography, Lambert was also an amateur maker of musical instruments, specialising in harpsichord

Harpsichord

A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...

s and clavichord

Clavichord

The clavichord is a European stringed keyboard instrument known from the late Medieval, through the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras. Historically, it was widely used as a practice instrument and as an aid to composition, not being loud enough for larger performances. The clavichord produces...

s.
In 1927, he lent a clavichord which he had built to Herbert Howells

Herbert Howells

Herbert Norman Howells CH was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music.-Life:...

; Howells used it to compose a 12-piece collection, which he named "Lambert's Clavichord".

Howells also introduced Lambert to Gerald Finzi

Gerald Finzi

Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a song-writer, but also wrote in other genres...

, whose 1936 Interlude for oboe & string quartet, Op. 21 was inspired by Lambert.

A Quaker, Lambert was imprisoned as a conscientious objector

Conscientious objector

A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

 during the First World War. He lived in Combe Down

Combe Down

Combe Down is a village suburb of Bath, England in the Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority within the ceremonial county of Somerset. Combe Down sits on a ridge above and about 1.5 miles to the south of Bath city centre. "Combe" or "coombe" is a West Country word meaning a steep-sided...

, Bath, Somerset.