I've been dipping in and out of Images of the Great War by Lawrence Dunn. Published by Austin Macauley, this is a lovely, wide-ranging book which covers not just those artists whose work will be familiar to many, but also lesser-known painters and illustrators some of whose work will be instantly recognisable, others less so.
Lawrence Dunn clearly knows his stuff and writes knowledgeably and enthusiastically. Here, in a single volume, we have well-known artists like Eric Kennington, Paul Nash, CR Nevinson, William Orpen and Stanley Spencer, and alongside them, the creators of iconic artwork who may be less well known: Anna Airy, Joyce Dennys, Flora Lion, and Norah Neilson-Gray. In fact women artists are well-represented. I have an original copy of Lucy Elizabeth Kemp-Welch's FORWARD on a wall at home, but what I didn't know was that the horse used in that poster was Lord Baden-Powell's charger, Black Prince, which he lent to the artist in 1906 and allowed her to keep when he left the army in 1910.
Henry Tonks and his studies of facially damaged servicemen is also here as are sculptors like Charles Sergeant Jagger and Sir Jacob Epstein. Bruce Bairnsfather and his "Old Bill" creation cover the cartoonists' response to the war and there is also a small section devoted to photography, although other photos also appear elsewhere in the book, giving context both to the paintings, and the shattered landscapes that would later be re-created on easels in artists' studios.
As I said, this book is wide-ranging, the reader being drawn not only into the lives of the talented generation which documented the conflict in charcoal, oils and pastels, but also to the poetry; images of the great war conjured up by the usual suspects like Graves, Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon but also lesser known poets: VAD nurse Winfred Letts and Iris Tree who studied art at the Slade but who is remembered in this volume though an untitled poem written in 1917.
Such was the creative outpouring during the war and in response to it afterwards that the author and publisher set themselves an almost impossible task when having to make those hard decisions on who to include and who to exclude. Thus there is no place for William Kermode and his linocuts which illustrated Henry Willamson's The Patriot's Progress in 1930, and no place either for Bernard Partridge, an established cartoonist well before the war, whose caricatures and fine pen-work dominated Punch during the war years, and whose illustrations would later be used in the ubiquitous King's Discharge Certificates which were despatched to hundreds of thousands of wounded and disabled ex-servicemen.
Such exclusions are a shame but understandable. This is already a weighty, large-format volume; somewhere between quarto and octavo in size, and running to over three hundred pages. If I have a criticism it is that some of the illustrations could be a little larger and personally, I would have sacrificed some of the poetry - or maybe all of the poetry - in order to include more of the paintings, more of the cartoons, more of the posters.
It almost seems churlish to suggest this. Make no mistake, Images of the Great War is an ambitious, thoughtful and beautifully produced work which will have enduring power and interest and gives another voice not only to the artists who created the works that are so beautifully illustrated and knowledgeably explained throughout, but also to the men and women who stimulated this artistic response. Both Lawrence Dunn and Austin Macauley are to be congratulated.
Images of the Great War is available in hardcover (£59.99) and softcover (£49.99) from Amazon and elsewhere. Click on the Amazon link to see sample images.
