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Inspired by his experiences as a youth in the bush near Warren, NSW, George W Lambert began this ambitious work at the age of 26, while living with his mother at Hornsby. He worked in a small shed in the garden, and had to position the painting diagonally across it, even then unable to stretch the canvas to its full extent. The painting was enthusiastically received as a heroic portrayal of bush life, displaying Lambert's innate skill at draughtsmanship. It was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape painting for 1899, and the following year Lambert left for London with the first New South Wales Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship. This work was acquired by the Gallery in 1899.

Inspired by his experiences as a youth in the bush near Warren, NSW, George W Lambert began this ambitious work at the age of 26, while living with his mother at Hornsby. He worked in a small shed in the garden, and had to position the painting diagonally across it, even then unable to stretch the canvas to its full extent. The painting was enthusiastically received as a heroic portrayal of bush life, displaying Lambert's innate skill at draughtsmanship. It was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape painting for 1899, and the following year Lambert left for London with the first New South Wales Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship. This work was acquired by the Gallery in 1899.

Lambert’s best-known bush image, Across the blac k soil plains was inspired by his memories of horse teams hauling heavily laden wool wagons across the bare, miry, flat lands of Snakes Plain from Warren to the railway station at Nevertire. He encountered this landscape while droving sheep in the 1890s and was reminded of it during a visit to Warren in 1899. Lambert suggested that Jim Smith, a known identity of the district, was the model for the teamster walking beside the wool wagon and urging the horses onwards (ML MSS A1811, p.54). It has also been claimed that the teamster was Luke Rollins from Moree, and Henry Sharkey, who carried a record load from Louth to Bourke. By portraying the rhythmic rise and fall of the horses’ heads and the tilt of the wagon, Lambert created a sense of movement in his image. The horses strain as they pull the load through the mud which sticks to their hoofs like glue, with the leader leaning into the chains to pull others into line. He dramatised the scene by placing the horses in silhouette against the sky and using the chiaroscuro of light and dark, showing the light making its way through the billowing clouds and illuminating the horses’ backs. In adopting a low viewpoint Lambert also made the team dominate the image. Apart from the blue in the sky the painting is a harmony of tonally balanced browns, beiges and white. Placing the large canvas diagonally across the garden shed or washhouse at his mother’s home in the Sydney suburb of Hornsby, Lambert began to work on it. He had made colour notes of the landscape, as well as sketches of Jim Smith’s team of horses while staying at Meryon in about 1895–6 (ML MSS A1811, p.17). He commented that: As a boy in the bush I did much work with draft [sic] horses ... [One] called Barney had such fine action and such imposing carriage ... and possibly what knowledge I displayed in connection with horses in ‘Black Soil Plains’ originated with my association with this exceptionally fine animal (ML MSS A1811, pp.54–5). He later scoured the area around his mother’s home for further models for the horses, and for each one in the team he made two or three oil studies (ML MSS A1811, pp.54–5). The painting echoes the spirit of a poem by the Scottish–Australian narrative poet and horseman, Will Ogilvie, ‘How the Fire Queen crossed the swamp’. This poem, published in Ogilivie’s first collection, Fair girls and gray horses (Sydney, 1898), included the lines: With straining muscles and tightened chains – sixteen pulling like one; With jingling harness and droning wheels and bare hoofs’ rhythmic tramp, With creaking timbers and lurching load the Fire Queen faced the swamp! Across the black soil plains inspired other poems such as ‘Across the black soil plains’ by ‘Mousquetaire’ (Gordon Tidy), which was published in the Bulletin , 30 October 1902 and was illustrated by Lambert’s painting. O nobly manned must be the land, and nobly horsed as well, Has such a sight as this to show, such story has to tell, The teamster who so sternly strides, the team so strongly strains Till stride and strength be come at length across the Black Soil Plains The picture received an enthusiastic response from contemporary critics. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote on 18 August 1899 ‘In this long narrow canvas the young artist paints with astonishing vigour and sense of movement ... in every conceivable attitude the horses tug and strain at the heavy load.’ It was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the New South Wales Society of Artists exhibition in 1899 and was subsequently awarded the 1899 Wynne Prize for landscape painting. More critical of his own work than many others, Lambert wrotein the Australian Magazine , 18 September 1899: It is strong, ‘masculine’ if you like; the horses are well drawn and painted, the movement and action are ‘all there,’ the teamster (and his dog) are realistic, the sky is good, the colour is harmonious, the subject is popular, and the picture has been purchased for the National Art Gallery – what more can we say? This: that when G.W. Lambert has studied and worked hard for a few more years, both here and abroad (as we hope he will) – well, then he may paint the ‘picture of the year’. The painting inspired variations in other media such as Tom Woodman’s glass painting Load of wool 1940, at the Carinda Hotel, New South Wales, as well as a plaster version. About 1855 Edward Roper painted a landscape entitled Bringing down the wool from a Murray station (National Library of Australia, Canberra), which included a bullock team with a load of wool. Frank Mahony also treated the subject of a wool wagon several times. These images have none of the action or drama of Lambert’s painting, nor the spirit of place. Out of the particular and the personal Lambert created an enduring icon conveying the toil of man and horse and their relationship with the land.

This is a lively bravura portrait of a modern Melbourne woman of fashion, style and elegance. It has an arresting vitality. Her belongings, a luscious blue stole, elegant feathered hat and jewelled ring, are as much the subject of this work as is Miss Collins herself, and contribute to it a sense of opulence. Her flamboyant pose, with her head slightly tilted back and poised to one side, and her arms caught in mid-action, matches her vivacious personality. Her eyes appear to be laughing in accord with her smile and she seems to be deliberately posing or hamming it up for the artist. The subject, Miss Gladys Neville Collins, was the daughter of J.T. Collins, lawyer, Victorian State Parliamentary draughtsman, and trustee of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria. Lambert appears to have enjoyed painting her portrait and described her to Amy on 10 December 1921 as ‘a dear girl [who] sits for the fun of it and because her Dad thinks I am it’ (ML MSS 97/10, p.393). Lambert portrayed the individual features of Miss Collins but, with her collaboration, he arranged them to denote a characteristic type. Miss Collins’s tilted head, her half-open mouth, half-closed eyes, and almost-bare right arm suggest an individual sensuality, but they also indicate a form of codified (sexual) behaviour. Lambert's portrait presents a witty version of the pose of Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa 1645–52 (Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome), an established expression of the ecstatic experience, and one which was subsequently taken up by photographers, film-makers and advertisers. What is more, Lambert presented Miss Collins in a variation of the pose used by Joshua Reynolds in his portrait Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse 1784, which in 1921 (the year Lambert painted this portrait) the Duke of Westminster had controversially sold to The Huntington Library and Art Collection in California. By associating Miss Collins with this classic image of a leading actress, he hinted that she was playing a role in this portrait. It is also possible that Lambert knew Sargent’s Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: a vele gonfie of 1905 (Tate, London), a lively portrait of Ena wearing as a joke a black feathered hat and billowing cloak, painted essentially in black and white. It is similar to Lambert’s painting in its sense of extravagant posture and light-heartedness. If nothing else, both paintings are a reflection of the spirit of the times. In this portrait Lambert used a limited range of colours to great effect: a dark Manet black and a Gainsborough blue, with the addition of purple in the jewel on a chain around her neck. Lambert paid close attention to the clothing, capturing an array of textures – the lustrous steel-blue silk of her stole, the fluffy white fur collar, the white leather gloves, the transparent black lace sleeve and the black velvet of the hat wreathed with white ostrich plumes. Lambert painted the portrait with broad brushstrokes, and spontaneously, as a kind of ‘performance in paint’. When exhibited, it stood out from the prevalent brown tonalist portraiture painted at this time by other Australian artists, such as John Longstaff and W.B. McInnes. (W.B. McInnes’s much more restrained Portrait of Miss Collins was awarded the Archibald Prize for 1924 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Lambert’s tour de force was purchased for 600 guineas by the Art Gallery of New South Wales when it was shown at the New South Wales Society of Artists exhibition in 1922; at that time the highest price paid by a public gallery for a portrait by an Australian artist.