Ella Condie Lamb: Passing On

Ella Condie Lamb

"Don't let my work hang like chain boxes around your neck.' So stated Ella Condie Lamb to her daughter toward the end of her life. Out of some need to release her children from the weight, the obligations, the sheer mass of the past, and from all the needs and wants of the previous generation, Ella had spoken.

But her children valued her art and did keep many of the private works they loved. Katharine reminisced, 'I remember when we were sorting through her things I'd look and say, 'I think I'd like that.' But then, I'd think, 'You can't keep too much. I'll just have to remember in my mind.' Ella would have been satisfied with that. Immortality was not necessary to her. To be an artist had been enough.

At some moment during the winters of her last years, Ella gazed intently through the large bay window of her beloved country home with her keenly observant artist's eye. She wrote: 

'As I look into the woodland it is as if a mighty painter had taken a brush with white paint, and yet not white, and dragged it across the soft gray, rough dry background, or canvas. Against this are the dark accents of tree trunks of all sizes and angles and curves with branches crossing and recrossing in a lovely tangled composition - each branch twig or tassel on the tips, each bush and weed with its line or cover of whiter snow - dark and light accents growing softer and softer until again merges into the grayness beyond... There is no wind. It is a white world, the snowflakes still drifting down.'

She died at The Fold one night in January of 1936 as a blizzard raged outdoors. She had had terrible neuralgia, a stabbing pain, that was just agony for her. This time she didn't survive it. Perhaps she had had a stroke. No one was able to reach Ella in time. The funeral was held at The Fold. Grandchildren Tony and David remembered it well.

'Her coffin was in the living room,' Tony recalled, 'I was really upset, I remember crying. Before the coffin was closed, Appa put in some kind of plaque or medal that Amma had won. It was something he thought was very important to her career.'

Charles lived six more years.From his wheelchair, he wrote letters to newspapers and to his children. He also made substantial notes for an autobiography. She had left him with a letter saying,

'The wind is howling tonight, but it makes me think of the old hotel in Bruges and our wedding trip. Dear, I wonder how many wedding trips are the introduction to as happy a life as ours. Hope you have been happy in spite of all the cares and anxieties - With much love, your wife'"

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)