FR02-07 POISON GAS AND THE ART OF JOHN SINGER SARGENT

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is perhaps the best-known American portrait artist, with his painting of The Four Doctors of Johns Hopkins in 1907. He also became one of the official artists employed by Great Britain following the Great War and was chosen to paint a memorial to that war in 1919. He chose surprisingly to depict the horrors of gas warfare. METHODS: A review of the literature of all aspects of John Singer Sargent was performed, including written materials and photographs from the British War Memorials Committee archives. The Declaration of the Hague of 1899 stated, “The contracting Powers agree to abstain from the use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” RESULTS: Sometime from 4 to 5 P.M. on April 22, 1915, the Germans started operations by releasing gases, resulting in a cloud of poisonous vapor rolling toward those of the French west of Langemark with the effect of the Germans charging forward over the practically unresisting enemy. Sargent’s painting was colossal—measuring six by three meters—and was selected by the Royal Academy as the picture of the year in 1919. Winston Churchill admired the work “for its brilliant genius and painful significance.” Virginia Woolf stated that the painting was testimony to the belief in soldierly suffering as something that has to be counted as the price that must be paid for the “greater good of the Empire.” CONCLUSIONS: Otto Dix published two etchings of gas victims some years following Sargent’s work; his are far darker and more morbid. He wanted to show the war “without all the propaganda.” “Dulce et Decorum est” are the words atop the rear entrance to the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater, which recall the Latin poem of Horace. It is fitting here in that it too was utilized by Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918), WWI soldier and poet who penned Anthem for a Doomed Youth as well as his verse on poison gas using Horace’s title—“Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man infire or lime—.” Sargent’s portrayal is a most evocative historical artefact of the horrors of chemical warfare in WWI. Source of Funding: None