Anzac, the landing 1915

One of the iconic paintings in the Memorial's collection. Lambert based the composition on various sources: oil sketches of the terrain he made during the Gallipoli Mission in 1919, studio sketches, and facts about the landing obtained from veterans and Bean. Important aspects of the landing have been included, such as the Australians arriving on the beach in the lower left corner, their struggle through the undergrowth, and their ascent up the steep slopes. The composition shows the vastness of the landscape, the inhospitable terrain, and the smallness of the men within it. Soldiers are shown dead and falling, and smoke rises from artillery fire in the background. The panorama of the landing is compressed and distorted in order to represent a pictorial narrative of crucial event.

"Visitors to the Museum … complain there is a lack of fire, a lack of action and of the terror of war, but on the facts … we must accept that men equipped as these men were, moving upwards on this particular place, without any idea of where the enemy was, what they had to do, would look just like this small swarm of ants climbing, no matter how rapidly, climbing painfully and laboriously upward through the uneven ground and spikey uncomfortable shrubs".