From the Second China War to ostentatious 18th-century military portraits and vivid modern images of mine clearing in Bosnia, the exhibition Caught on Canvas, in the National Army Museum’s newly opened White Space Gallery, records centuries of British conflicts in oil.
The new gallery will run rolling three-month thematic displays of some of the museum’s vast collections. Many of the works, from paintings to photographs and love letters, have been buried away from public view. Caught on Canvas is a selection of oil paintings either by army servicemen or of them. Some are new, some well known and some long unseen. “The variety catches the mix and richness of our collection,” says Jenny Spencer-Smith, the gallery’s curator. “We wanted to capture how people painted, why, and what they painted on. The paintings offer snippets of history.”
An early 19th-century portrait by the Scottish painter Sir Henry Raeburn, Lieutenant John James Douglas, 15th King’s Light Dragoons (Hussars), dominates the room in size and pomp. This dashing young lieutenant, who fought at Waterloo, commissioned the painting of himself dressed in his cavalry officer’s uniform. Besides the tight trousers and bearskin, the painting reveals the practicality of his regalia, including a warm dolman and gold thread attaching his headdress, which could be worn on horseback in battle.
A nude by William Etty, entitled Guardsman Higgins, painted at the height of his artistic career in 1830, shocked contemporaries with its fleshy nakedness. Higgins was a young London-based guard who, thanks to his strapping physique honed by army life, earned extra money as an artist’s model. It was not uncommon practice. Some became popular with less salubrious clientele.
The images of recent conflicts form a stark contrast. They were sketched and painted on the move in war-torn Bosnia and Afghanistan, rather than staged in a studio at home, where the artists had often never seen a battle and were more concerned with painting glamorous uniforms than realism. “They are not official war art but instead good quality work by soldiers which we feel captures their experiences,” says Spencer-Smith. Welcome to the Irish Republic, Sir! records the moment that the artist, Captain Jonathan Wade, of the Royal Highland Fusiliers, realised that his patrol, lost in the emerald countryside of Northern Ireland, had stumbled over the border into the Irish Republic. A Kabul street-scene, The Fourth Man, by Sergeant Major Douglas Farthing, who served with the 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, shows three soldiers patrolling a narrow, shadowed alleyway past gaggles of inquisitive children, from the perspective of the fourth man.
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The exhibition includes an early painting by the great British abstract artist Sir Terry Frost, Sergeant Ernie Little, 5th Buffs, as a Prisoner of War. Frost fought in the Second World War and was captured in Crete before being imprisoned in Stalag 383, near Munich. With little artistic training, he began painting his fellow inmates. The image, a gaunt man, his haggard, lined face dashed with greens, drawn on the back of some old canvas from a mail-bag, was one of the first he ever drew. “There were few materials available to him to use,” says Spencer-Smith. “But drawing became his way to fill the time and ease the boredom.”
An intimate portrait of a wounded guardsman by Elizabeth Thompson was a study for The Roll Call, a Crimean scene that was acquired by Queen Victoria and convinced the art critic John Ruskin that women could paint. Her paintings brought to life the scale of suffering and destitution of ordinary British soldiers in the Crimea. The artist herself declared: “I never painted for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism.”
Two little-known paintings, one of a group of prisoners of war wrapped against the cold and snow at Giessen camp in Germany, and a portrait of a Canadian prisoner, hang together for the first time. The artist, a Frenchman, used the lid of a food package belonging to the hollow-faced prisoner in the portrait to paint the scene of Giessen. On the back you can still make out the contents list: potted meat, prunes and golden syrup.
Caught on Canvas, the White Space Gallery, The National Army Museum, London SW3. Runs until September.