Giles Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), the critic and biographer and an important member of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, sat for this imposing portrait some years before he became famous with such books as Eminent Victorians, 1918, Queen Victoria, 1921, and Elizabeth and Essex, 1928. Strachey was a critic and biographer who established a reputation with his book 'Eminent Victorians', published in 1918. He was one of the members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, which included the writer Virginia Woolf and the painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Lamb painted a small portrait of Strachey in his studio in the Vale of Health, Hampstead in 1912, and then painted this grand larger version two years later. Strachey once said that he was unable to lift a match before breakfast and this portrait shows him in a typically languid pose. [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lamb-lytton-strachey-t00118]