Scotland's war artists from the Boer war to Bosnia

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Andrew's book reveals the sheer multitude of Scottish artists who made war-related art in the 20th century

A Chasm in Time: Scottish War Art and Artist in the Twentieth Century by Patricia R. Andrew

The title of the book comes from a letter to his brother by the Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895–1915), who wrote ‘The war is a chasm in time....’  He hoped that in time those who saw war as a noble cause would fall silent in face of the realities of its horror. 

On the 11th day of the 11th month in the year 1918, the 'Great War' which had begun in 1914, ended.  Annual observations occur each November marking  the end of that war as well as memorializing those conflicts that have followed. This past year there have been many special commemorations because of the hundred years that now lie between us and the beginning of that war.  Artists were involved in what we now refer to as the First World War as combatants and as recorders of their time, on the field of battle and at home, as formally commissioned war artists (the first time this had occurred) or as observers, doing what artists do, taking notice of their surroundings.

The contributions of a few Scottish artists whose work acknowledged the conflicts of the 20th century have been noted in monographs on the most well-known names, but this well-illustrated book addresses the sheer multitude of artists involved in producing war-related art in the 20th century, many of whom are not well known. The book attempts to bring Scottish war art and Scottish art in general the wider recognition they deserve.

The book takes its starting point in 1900 during the Boer War (1899–1902), when Britain was at war with Dutch settlements in South Africa in, as the author says, ‘..a war fought in khaki’.  The nature of war art was changing, from paintings of dramatic events with soldiers clad in brilliant colours to images of everyday activities of soldiers from Scottish regiments at ease in their tents, in uniforms more in keeping with the colours of the landscape they were fighting in (where bright colors made a soldier a gift to a sniper).

The First World War brought with it the first official scheme for war artists, started in 1916, the same year that conscription began and tanks were first used.  It was initially intended for propaganda purposes but grew into the largest and most comprehensive programme of national patronage of art that Britain, until then, had ever known.  It soon became the creation of an artistic record, and thus a tool of commemoration.  And many Scottish artists were employed in this fashion in both world wars.

At the beginning of the First World War many artists signed up straight away, while artists such as Patrick William Adam (1852 –1929), who were too old for actual service, responded with paintings that recorded something of their outrage at war's effect. One such is Adam’s painting War, 1915, which appears to be  a home in Belgium after Germany's invasion of that country.

The greatest number of illustrations in A Chasm in Time are in the chapter devoted to the War and its aftermath.  Later in the war, the focus of war art moved from the military effort to the involvement of British society as a whole and the Imperial War Museum, newly formed in 1917, dealt with commissioning such subjects as Shop for Machining 15-inch shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow by Anna Airy  (1882–1964).  (The Singer sewing machine factory served in the war effort in both World Wars)

English artists who painted the war effort in Scotland are also included in this book, for example, Charles Pears (1873–1958) painted A Corner of the Dockyard, Rosyth: Winter, 1918, which focuses on a change of shift and the grey light of a Scottish winter day, broken up by search lights.  Norah Nelson Gray (1882–1931), who later taught at the Glasgow School of Art, worked in France as a nurse. Her painting The Scottish Women's Hospital was  commissioned by the Women's Work Section of the Imperial War Museum in order to emphasize the importance of women doctors during the war.

Commemorations to the fallen were painted during the war, with Avatar (1916) by Henry John Lintott (1878–1965) a dramatic and moving example.  Lintott was English, trained in London and Paris and then moved to Edinburgh in 1902 to join what would become the Edinburgh College of Art. 

Artists who painted the Scots in England are included in this survey, such as The Arrival (1918) by the Ukrainian-born and English-raised Bernard Meninsky (1891–1950). This shows in a very contemporary style the arrival of Scottish soldiers at Victoria Station in London. 

After the war was over, numerous artists summed it up in large commissioned paintings. The Scots artist D.Y. Cameron (1865–1945), best known for his landscape paintings and etchings, received a number of commissions during and after the war, such as A Garment of War,  a record  of war's devastation.

The Second World War began in 1939.  The strength of this book lies in the historical descriptions of the build-up to each of the two World Wars, explaining the mechanics of the governmental approaches to encouraging patriotism through the use of art, whether it be recruitment campaigns that required very clever poster art, or the recording  of war both on the home front and at the front itself.

Portraits were commissioned of  civil defence volunteers or the peace of a city waiting for the war to come to it, such as the 1940 painting of his own back garden in Dundee by James McIntosh Patrick (1907–98), A City Garden, with its view of factories beyond his garden walls while an air raid shelter is being built. 

Keith Henderson (1883–1982) served in France during the First World War.  Along with the English artist, Paul Nash,  he became one of the first salaried Air Ministry artists in the Second World War, located at the Leuchars base near St Andrews, where he embarked on some very innovative compositions, such as Air Gunner in Action in a Turret: Night, 1940.

Through its copious illustrations,  A Chasm in Time, allows us to see the responses to war of artists trained in the Scottish art colleges, examples of many well-known English artists who came to Scotland to record the war effort, particularly during the Second World War, and the many artist visitors from abroad who wound up in Scotland during that war, some as refugees or displaced soldiers, such as the Poles, or prisoners of war, many of them Italian.

At the close, there is a consideration of more recent conflicts, such as those in the South Atlantic and in the former Yugoslavia, that Scottish artists have considered, some officially and many unofficially. Peter Howson (b.1958), studied at the Glasgow School of Art and his early reputation rests on  paintings of Glasgow's underclass.  He was appointed the official British war artist for the Bosnian  conflict in 1993.  His painting, Cleansed, of  1994, shows refugees outside a village patrolled by blue-helmeted UN peace keepers.  

The book closes with a description of memorials and meditations on war throughout the century, with posthumous portraits, memorials in stained glass and sculpture.  Artists who remember and question are, rightly, at the end, whether it is Robin Philipson (1916–1992) who served in Burma during the Second World War, and who yearned to be able to paint the things he saw there, and wound up years later making paintings in the 1960s that commemorated the First World War, or John Bellany (1942–2013) and Joyce Cairns (b.1947), whose images relate to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Majdanek.

Although the book is completely free of jargon and the author expresses a desire to aim at a general readership, there is an assumption throughout the text that the reader will already have some knowledge  and understanding of 19th- and 20th-century European artists and movements, particularly French, English and Scottish.

Readers of this book will meet a few artists they know and many they have never heard of, with a few paintings they've seen and many they never knew existed, and they will learn a great deal of history about the making of 20th-century art.  I do hope that the work of many of those artists who have been little known until now will see more of the light of day as a result of this book.  

A Chasm in Time:  Scottish War Art and Artist in the Twentieth Century  by Patricia R. Andrew is published by Birlinn, 2014.272pp.,  233 colour illus, £30.00 (hbk).Also available as an eBook. Print ISBN 9781780271903