Gassed by Sargent: The Blind March of World War I (1919)
A line of soldiers shuffles across the canvas, their eyes covered with bandages. Each man rests a hand on the shoulder of the one in front, and an orderly guides them along a duckboard path towards a dressing station. One soldier lifts his foot absurdly high, unable to see the step. All around them, on the ground, lie dozens of other wounded men, waiting their turn. The low evening sun hangs in a yellow haze. Gassed, completed by John Singer Sargent in March 1919, is one of the most famous images of the First World War, and one of the largest: more than six metres long.
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Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Date: Completed March 1919
Medium: Oil on canvas, about 231 × 611 cm
Collection: Imperial War Museum, London
Notable fact: Sargent witnessed the scene near Arras in August 1918; the picture was voted picture of the year at the Royal Academy in 1919
What does the painting show?
The composition is built like an ancient frieze. Across the centre runs the main group: soldiers in khaki, rifles slung, packs on their backs, eyes bound with white bandages after a mustard gas attack. They move from left to right in single file, linked by their hands on each other's shoulders, led by orderlies who are not blinded. On the right, a second line of men is being led the same way towards the guy ropes of the dressing station tent.
The foreground is covered with more casualties lying on the grass: some asleep or unconscious, some holding their eyes, one drinking from a water bottle. They are painted in the same dull greens and browns as the earth, so that at first glance the ground itself seems made of men. Above them, the sky is a hazy golden yellow, and a pale sun sinks on the right. In the far distance, if you look closely, tiny figures of soldiers can be seen playing football, a reminder that ordinary life went on a short distance from the suffering.
The tone is quiet rather than violent. There is no blood, no explosion, no enemy in sight. Sargent shows the slow, patient misery of the aftermath, and the dignity of men helping each other forward.
What Sargent saw
In 1918 the British War Memorials Committee commissioned Sargent, then the most celebrated portrait painter in the English-speaking world, to paint a large picture for a planned Hall of Remembrance. In July he travelled to the Western Front with his fellow painter Henry Tonks. On 21 August 1918, at Le Bac-du-Sud near Arras, he saw the aftermath of a German mustard gas attack on British troops, with the wounded being brought to a dressing station. He decided at once that this would be his subject.
Mustard gas did not usually kill outright, but it burned the skin, lungs and eyes, causing temporary blindness that could last for days or weeks. The bandaged eyes in Sargent's painting were exactly what the medical teams did for these men.
Reception
When Gassed was shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition in 1919, it was voted picture of the year. Not everyone admired it. Some writers, among them Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, found its calm, heroic beauty too comfortable for the horror it showed. For others, its restraint is exactly what makes it so moving. It is a very different kind of war painting from Goya's The Third of May 1808, where the violence is happening before our eyes.
Sargent is better known for his glamorous society portraits and for sunlit scenes like Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, which makes Gassed all the more striking. The same eye for light that painted children with lanterns in an English garden here paints a column of blind men under a setting sun.
Where can you see it?
The Hall of Remembrance was never built, and the painting went to the Imperial War Museum in London, where it is one of the highlights of the collection. A major conservation treatment in 2023 removed decades of yellowed varnish and revealed much more of Sargent's original colour. While in London, you can also see Turner's The Fighting Temeraire at the National Gallery.
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Sources
Wikipedia, "Gassed (painting)".
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