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Gas Warfare in Art
In 1918, the British Ministry of Information commissioned four monumental paintings for a national Hall of Remembrance. Sixty-two year old John Singer Sargent, then a London resident, received one of those commissions to document Anglo-American cooperation in the Great War. Instead, with the concurrence of the British government, Sargent depicted a procession of gassed and wounded soldiers, led by an orderly and making their difficult way to a medical tent. Sargent sketched from life as a witness to this event in July of 1918 at Bac-du-sud, near Arras in northern France, documenting British soldiers' injuries and the painful, blinding effects of mustard gas exposure. |