Charles Lamb was the eldest son of a Northern Ireland painter and decorator. He studied life-drawing in Belfast before winning a scholarship to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1917. Like so many painters and writers, Lamb focused on the people and places of the West of Ireland as the last vestige of what they saw as a true Irish culture. Unlike their Celtic Revival predecessors, it was contemporary rural Ireland that this generation aggrandised, celebrating its rugged heroism. In 1935, after a long relationship with the West, Lamb settled and worked in Carraroe, an Irish-speaking part of Connemara, but showed his work around Ireland, England and the United States of America.