Canadian official war artists: Difference between revisions

Canadian official war artists were a select group of artists who were employed on contract, or commissioned to produce specific works during the First World War, the Second World War and select military actions in the post-war period.^[1] Official war artists have been appointed by governments for information or propaganda purposes and to record events on the battlefield;^[2] 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.^[3] A war artist creates a visual account of war by showing its impact as men and women are shown waiting, preparing, fighting, suffering, celebrating,^[4]

The works produced by war artists illustrate and record many aspects of war, and the individual's experience of war, whether allied or enemy, service or civilian, military or political, social or cultural. The rôle of the artist and his work embraces the causes, course and consequences of conflict and it has an essentially educational purpose.^[3]

Representative works by Canada's war artists have been gathered into the extensive collection of the Canadian War Museum. In the First World War, Canada developed an official art program under the influence of Lord Beaverbrook. He provided leadership in creating the Canadian War Records Office in London. He also established the Canadian War Memorials Fund which evolved into a collection of war art by artists and sculptors in Britain and Canada. Some of these were considered "official" war artists. For example, the English artist Alfred Munnings was was employed as war artist to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade.

Alfred Munnings

Munnings painted many scenes, including a mounted portrait of General Jack Seely Warrior in 1918 (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).^[5] Munnings worked on this canvas a few thousand yards from the German front lines. When General Seely's unit was forced into a hasty withdrawal, the artist discovered what it was like to come under shellfire.^[6]

Munnings also painted Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron in 1918 (now in the collection of the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa).^[7] In what is known as "the last great cavalry charge" at the Battle of Moreuil Wood, Gordon Flowerdew was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for leading Lord Strathcona's Horse (Royal Canadians) in a successful engagement with entrenched German forces.^[8]

The Canadian Forestry Corps invited Munnings to tour their work camps, and he produced drawings, watercolors and paintings, including Draft Horses, Lumber Mill in the Forest of Dreux in France in 1918.^[9] This role of horses was critical and under-reported; and in fact, horse fodder was the single largest commodity shipped to the front by some countries.^[10]

The "Canadian War Records Exhibition" at the Royal Academy after war's end included forty-five of Munnings canvasses.^[11]

The Canadian War Records (CWR) was the name given to Canada's Second World War art program. The CWR produced two kinds of art: field sketches and finished paintings. The War Artists' Committee (WAC) recommended that the artists should attempt to share in the experience of "active operations" in order to "know and understand the action, the circumstances, the environment, and the participants." The ultimate goal was defined as "productions" which were "worthy of Canada's highest cultural traditions, doing justice to History, and as works of art, worthy of exhibition anywhere at any time."^[12]

There was a general appreciation of the need to develop what "the camera cannot interpret." The government recognized that "a war so epic in its scope by land, sea and air, and so detailed and complex in its mechanism, requires interpreting [by artists] as well as recording."^[1]

• Maurice Cullen
• Kenneth Forbes
• Alexander Young Jackson, 1882–1974
• C.W. Jefferys
• Arthur Lismer
• David Milne
• Frederick Varley

• Miller Brittain, 1912–1968.^[13]
• Alan Brockman Beddoe, 1893–1975.^[14]
• Molly Lamb Bobak, 1922–    .^[15]
• Frank Leonard Brooks, 1911–    .^[16]
• Paraskeva Clark, 1898–1986.^[17]
• David Alexander Colville, 1920–    .^[18]
• Charles Fraser Comfort, 1900–1994.^[19]
• Robert Stewart Hyndman, 1915–    
• Pegi Nicol MacLeod, 1904–1949.^[20]
• Jack Nichols, 1921–    .^[21]
• William Abernethy Ogilvie, 1901–1989
• Goodridge Roberts, 1904–1974.^[22]
• Frederick Taylor, 1906–1987.^[23]

• Edward "Ted" Fenwick Zuber, 1932–    

• War artists
• Military art
• War photography
• Norman Wilkinson (artist)

• McCloskey, Barbara. (2005). Artists of World War II. Westport: Greenwood Press. 10-ISBN 0313321531/13-ISBN 9780313321535; OCLC 475496457

• Gallatin, Albert Eugene. Art and the Great War. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1919).
• Oliver, Dean Frederick, and Laura Brandon (2000). Canvas of war: painting the Canadian experience, 1914 to 1945. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 1550547720
• Tippett, Maria, 1944. Art at the service of war: Canada, art, and the great war. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

• Kandahar Journal Contemporary war artist Richard Johnson in Kandahar, Afghanistan