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British Official War Artists
British official war artists were a select group of artists who were employed on contract, or commission (art), commissioned to produce specific works during the First World War, the Second World War and select military actions in the post-war period.Tolson, Roger "A Common Cause: Britain's War Artists Scheme."Canadian War Museum, 2005. Official war artists have been appointed by governments for information or propaganda purposes and to record events on the battlefield; but there are many other types of war artist. A war artist will have depicted some aspect of war through art; this might be a pictorial record or it might commemorate how war shapes lives.Imperial War Museum (IWM)About the Imperial War Museum A war artist creates a visual account of war by showing its impact as men and women are shown waiting, preparing, fighting, suffering and celebrating.Canadian War Museum (CWM) "Australia, Britain and Canada in the Second World War,"2005. The works produced by war artists illu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commission (art)
In art, a commission is the act of requesting the creation of a piece, often on behalf of another. Artwork may be commissioned by private individuals, by the government, or businesses. Commissions often resemble endorsement or sponsorship. In classical music, ensembles often commission pieces from composers, where the ensemble secures the composer's payment from private or public organizations or donors. Commissions and visual artist Throughout history, it has been common for rulers and governments to commission public art as a means of demonstrating power and wealth, or even for specific propaganda purposes. In ancient Rome, large architectural projects were commissioned as symbols of imperial glory. The Roman Colosseum for example, was commissioned by Emperor Vespasian. Public statuary was widespread, depicting mythical and heroic figures. The frieze that is carved into the Marcus Column, located at the Campus Martius, depicts the figure of Victory, and would have been co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Orpen
Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931) was an Irish artist who worked mainly in London. Orpen was a fine draughtsman and a popular, commercially successful painter of portraits for the well-to-do in Edwardian society, though many of his most striking paintings are self-portraits. During World War I, he was the most prolific of the official war artists sent by Britain to the Western Front. There he produced drawings and paintings of ordinary soldiers, dead men, and German prisoners of war, as well as portraits of generals and politicians. Most of these works, 138 in all, he donated to the British government; they are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. His connections to the senior ranks of the British Army allowed him to stay in France longer than any of the other official war artists, and although he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1918 Birthday Honours, and also elected a membe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director of the National Gallery is Gabriele Finaldi. The National Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the government on behalf of the British public, and entry to the main collection is free of charge. Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein in 1824. After that initial purchase, the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, especially Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which now account for two-thirds ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the ''Civilisation'' series in 1969. The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
War Artists' Advisory Committee
The War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), was a British government agency established within the Ministry of Information at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and headed by Sir Kenneth Clark. Its aim was to compile a comprehensive artistic record of Britain throughout the war. This was achieved both by appointing official war artists, on full-time or temporary contracts and by acquiring artworks from other artists. When the committee was dissolved in December 1945 its collection consisted of 5,570 works of art produced by over four hundred artists. This collection was then distributed to museums and institutions in Britain and around the world, with over half of the collection, some 3,000 works, going to the Imperial War Museum. Aims and objectives The stated aim of the WAAC, and the War Artists Advisory Scheme, which it ran, was: Clark, then director of the National Gallery, was the driving force behind the establishment of the committee. The advent of World War II ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His ''oeuvre'' documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, Spain, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Born in Florence to American parents, he was trained in Paris before moving to London, living most of his life in Europe. He enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter. An early submission to the Paris Salon in the 1880s, his ''Portrait of Madame X'', was intended to consolidate his position as a society painter in Paris, but instead resulted in scandal. During the next year following the scandal, Sargent departed for England where he continued a successful career as a portrait artist. From the beginning, Sargent's work is ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gassed (painting)
''Gassed'' is a very large oil painting completed in March 1919 by John Singer Sargent. It depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War, with a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station. Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war and visited the Western Front in July 1918 spending time with the Guards Division near Arras, and then with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres. The painting was finished in March 1919 and voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. It is now held by the Imperial War Museum. It visited the US in 1999 for a series of retrospective exhibitions, and then from 2016 to 2018 for exhibitions commemorating the centenary of the First World War. Details The painting measures . The composition includes a central group of eleven soldiers depicted nearly life-size. Nine wounded soldiers walk in a line, in three groups of three, along a duckboa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Menin Road (painting)
''The Menin Road'' is a large oil painting by Paul Nash completed in 1919 that depicts a First World War battlefield. Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to paint a battlefield scene for the proposed national Hall of Remembrance. The painting is considered one of the most iconic images of the First World War and is held by the Imperial War Museum. Background In September 1914, the British government set up a propaganda department at Wellington House to influence domestic and overseas opinion. In 1916 Wellington House established a section to distribute films and publications such as ''War Pictorial'' and argued for practising artists to be sent to the Western Front. In 1916, Max Aitken had established the Canadian War Records Office (CWRO), aiming to create an artistic and photographic record of the activities of Canadian forces. In February 1918, Aitken was made head of the new British Ministry of Information (MoI) and subsequently established the Br ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''BLAST,'' the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include ''Tarr'' (1918) and ''The Human Age'' trilogy, composed of ''The Childermass'' (1928), ''Monstre Gai'' (1955) and ''Malign Fiesta'' (1955). A fourth volume, titled ''The Trial of Man'', was unfinished at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes: '' Blasting and Bombardiering'' (1937) and ''Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date'' (1950). Biography Early life Lewis was born on 18 November 1882, reputedly on his father's yacht off the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.Richard Cork"Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882–1957)" ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004. His English mother, Anne Stuart Lewis (née Prickett), and American father, Charles Edward Lewis, separated about 1893. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts. Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and the ''Shipbuilding on the Clyde'' series, the former being a First World War memorial while the latter was a commission for the War Artists' Advisory Committee during the Second World War. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hall Of Remembrance
The Hall of Remembrance was a series of paintings and sculptures commissioned, in 1918, by the British War Memorials Committee of the British Ministry of Information in commemoration of the dead of World War I. History The artworks commissioned for the Hall of Remembrance were to be devoted to 'fighting subjects, home subjects and the war at sea and in the air' and were to be displayed in a specially built structure. The building was to be designed to accommodate a series of paintings based upon the dimensions of the large triptych, ''The Battle of San Romano'' by Paolo Uccello, one part of which is now in the National Gallery. The scheme was initiated by Lord Beaverbrook, the then Minister of Information and echoed the scale of a war art programme he had launched for the government of Canada. Although the architect Charles Holden completed a design for the building, the plan was abandoned and those artworks that had been completed, along with works donated by Muirhead Bone ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook
William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (25 May 1879 – 9 June 1964), generally known as Lord Beaverbrook, was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century. His base of power was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the '' Daily Express'', which appealed to the conservative working class with intensely patriotic news and editorials. During the Second World War, he played a major role in mobilising industrial resources as Winston Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production. The young Max Aitken had a gift for making money and was a millionaire by 30. His business ambitions quickly exceeded opportunities in Canada and he moved to Britain. There he befriended Bonar Law and with his support won a seat in the House of Commons at the December 1910 United Kingdom general election. A knighthood followed shortly after. During the First World War he ran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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