Elsie Janis

Elsie Janis (March 16, 1889 – February 26, 1956) was an American singer, songwriter, actress, and screenwriter. Entertaining the troops during World War I immortalized her as "the sweetheart of the AEF" (American Expeditionary Force).

Janis was a tireless advocate for British and American soldiers fighting in World War I. She raised funds for Liberty Bonds. Janis also took her act on the road, entertaining troops stationed near the front lines - one of the first popular American artists to do so in a war fought on foreign soil. Ten days after the armistice she recorded for HMV several numbers from her revue Hullo, America, including Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl. She wrote about her wartime experiences in The Big Show: My Six Months with the American Expeditionary Forces (published in 1919), and recreated them in a 1926 Vitaphone musical short, Behind the Lines.

Vera Lynn

Dame Vera Lynn, DBE (born Vera Margaret Welch on 20 March 1917) [1] is an English singer-songwriter and actress whose musical recordings and performances were enormously popular during World War II.

During the war she toured Egypt, India and Burma, giving outdoor concerts for the troops. She became known, and is still referred to, as "The Forces' Sweetheart"; the songs most associated with her are "We'll Meet Again", "The White Cliffs of Dover" and "There'll Always Be an England".

She remained popular after the war, appearing on radio and television in the UK and the United States and recording such hits as "Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart" and "My Son, My Son".

In 2009 she became the oldest living artist to make it to No. 1 on the British album chart, at the age of 92. She has devoted much time and energy to charity work connected with ex-servicemen, disabled children and breast cancer. She is still held in great affection by veterans of the Second World War and in 2000 was named the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the twentieth century.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcunREYzNY

Gracie Fields

Dame Gracie Fields, DBE (born Grace Stansfield, 9 January 1898 – 27 September 1979), was an English-born, later Italian-based actress, singer and comedienne and star of both cinema and music hall

During World War II, she paid for all servicemen/women to travel free on public transport within the boundaries of Rochdale.

Fields also helped Rochdale F.C. in the 1930s when they were struggling to pay fees and buy sports equipment.

In 1933 she set up the Gracie Fields Children's Home and Orphanage at Peacehaven in Sussex for children of those in the theatre profession who could not look after their children. She kept this until 1967, when the home was no longer needed. This was near her own home in Peacehaven, and Fields often visited, with the children all calling her 'Aunty Grace'.

World War II


Fields, accompanied by an RAF orchestra, entertains airmen at their 1939 Christmas party.
World War II was declared while she was recovering in Capri, and Fields - still very ill after her operation, threw herself into her work and signed up for ENSA headed by her old film producer, Basil Dean. Fields travelled to France to entertain the troops in the midst of air-raids, performing on the backs of open lorries and in war-torn areas. She was the first artist to play behind enemy lines in Berlin.

Following her divorce from Archie Pitt, she married Italian-born film director Monty Banks in March 1940.

However, because Banks remained an Italian citizen and would have been interned in the United Kingdom, she was forced to leave Britain for North America during the war, at the instruction of Winston Churchill, who told her to "Make American Dollars, not British Pounds," which she did in aid of the Navy League and the Spitfire Fund. She and Banks moved to their home in Santa Monica, California. She did occasionally return to England to show she was not indeed a traitor, performing in factories and army camps around the country. After their initial argument, Parliament offered her an official apology.

Although she continued to spend much of her time entertaining troops and otherwise supporting the war effort outside Britain, this led to a fall-off in her popularity at home. She performed many times for Allied troops, travelling as far as New Guinea, where she received an enthusiastic response from Australian personnel. Late 1945 saw her tour the South Pacific Islands.

Philip Wilson Steer

Philip Wilson Steer OM (28 Dec 1860 – 18 March 1942) was a British painter of landscape and occasional portraits and figure studies. He was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain.

HideLife and work

Philip Wilson Steer was born on 28 December 1860 in Birkenhead, in Merseyside, near Liverpool. He was the son of the portrait-painter, Philip Steer (1810-1871).

After finding the examinations of the British Civil Service too demanding, he became an artist in 1878. He studied at the Gloucester School of Art and then from 1880 to 1881 at the South Kensington Drawing Schools. He was rejected by the Royal Academy of Art, and so studied in Paris between 1882 and 1884, firstly at the Académie Julian, and then in the École des Beaux Arts under Cabanel, where he became a follower of the Impressionist school.

Between 1883 and 1885 he exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1886 he became a founder of the New English Art Club, with whom he continued to exhibit regularly.

Between 1893 and 1930 he taught painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He lived in Chelsea, but in the summers painted in Yorkshire, the Cotswolds and the West Country and on the south and east coasts of Britain.

During World War I he was recruited by Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Information, to paint pictures of the Royal Navy.

In 1931 he was awarded the Order of Merit.

He died in London, 18 March 1942.

Steer is best known for his landscapes, such as 'The Beach at Walberswick' (1890; Tate Gallery, London), and 'Girls Running: Walberswick Pier' (1894,Tate Gallery, London). With Walter Sickert he became a leading British Impressionist. Besides the French Impressinists he was influenced by Whistler and also by such old masters as Boucher, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. He also painted a number of portraits and figure studies (e.g. 'Portrait of Mrs. Raynes' (1922, Tate Gallery, London)).

I love the style in which steer paints it's not clean but it's not raw it give the painting Its own unique edge.

Augustus John

During World War I, he was attached to the Canadian forces as a war artist and made a number of memorable portraits of Canadian infantrymen. The end result was to have been a huge mural for Lord Beaverbrook and the sketches and cartoon for this suggest that it might have become his greatest large-scale work. However, like so many of his monumental conceptions, it was never completed. As a war artist, he was allowed to keep his facial hair and therefore, he and King George V were the only officers in the Allied forces to have a beard. After two months in France he was sent home in disgrace after taking part in a brawl. Lord Beaverbrook, whose intervention saved John from a court-martial, sent him back to France after he had produced a series of studies for the prospective Canadian War Memorial picture, although the only major work to result from the experience was Fraternity. In 2011, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge unveiled his mural "The Canadians Opposite Lens", a donation to the Canadian War Museum from the Beaverbrook foundation.

Birth name Augustus Edwin John
Born 4 January 1878
Tenby, Pembrokeshire
Died 31 October 1961 (aged 83)
Fordingbridge, Hampshire
Nationality Welsh


Johns drawing are straight forward clean and document the effects of war.

Francis Edgar Dodd

Francis Edgar Dodd RA (29 November 1874 – 7 March 1949) was a notable British portrait and landscape artist and printmaker.

During the World War I, in 1916, he was appointed an official war artist by Charles Masterman, the head of the War Propaganda Bureau (WPB). Serving on the Western Front, he produced more than 30 portraits of senior military figures.

However, he also earned a considerable peace-time reputation for the quality of his water-colours and portrait commissions. He was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1929 and was elected to the Royal Academy in 1935.

He lived from 1911 until taking his own life in 1949 in Arundel House (51 Blackheath Park) in Blackheath, London SE3.

Sir Muirhead Bone

Sir Muirhead Bone (23 March 1876 – 21 October 1953) was a Scottish etcher, drypoint and watercolour artist.

The son of a printer, Bone was born in Glasgow and trained initially as an architect, later going on to study art at Glasgow School of Art. He began printmaking in 1898, and although his first known print was a lithograph, he is better known for his etchings and drypoints. His subject matter was principally related to landscapes, architecture (which often focussed on urban construction and demolition sites) and industry.

In 1901 he moved to London, where he met William Strang, Dugald MacColl and Alphonse Legros, and later became a member of the New English Art Club. Bone was also a member of the Glasgow Art Club with which he exhibited. After the outbreak of the First World War, Charles Masterman, head of the British War Propaganda Bureau and acting on the advice of William Rothenstein, appointed Bone as Britain's first official war artist in May 1916.

To many, Bone had the ideal credentials for this official appointment and, although thirty-eight years old at the outbreak of war, he was rescued from certain enlistment by the intervention of those in the art establishment who recognized what an asset his work might be as pictorial propaganda for the Allied cause. Furthermore, Bone worked almost exclusively in black and white; his drawings were invariably small and their realistic intensity reproduced well in the government-funded publications of the day. Where some artists might have demurred at the challenge of drawing ocean liners in a drydock or tens of thousands of shells in a munitions factory, Bone delighted in them; he was rarely intimidated by complex subjects and whatever the challenge those who commissioned his work could always be sure that out of superficial chaos there emerged a beautiful and ordered design.

Commissioned as an honorary Second Lieutenant, he arrived in France during the Battle of the Somme, serving with the Allied forces on the Western Front and also with the Royal Navy for a time. He produced 150 drawings of the war, returning to England in October of that year. Over the next few months Bone returned to his earlier subject matter, drawing pictures of shipyards and battleships. He visited France again in 1917 where he took particular interest in the ruined towns and villages.

Bones ability to capture the tiniest detail in his etchings drawings and prints is simply breath taking,his precision and skill brings the image to life.

Alfred leete

Alfred Ambrose Chew Leete (1882–1933) was a British graphic artist. Born at Thorpe Achurch, Northamptonshire, he studied at Kingsholme School, Weston-super-Mare, before moving to London in 1899 and taking a post as an artist with a printer. His career as a paid artist had begun in 1897 when the Daily Graphic accepted one of his drawings; later he contributed regularly to a number of magazines including Punch magazine, the Strand magazine, Tatler, etc. As a commercial artist he designed numerous posters and advertisements, especially in the 1910s and 1920s, for such brands as Rowntrees chocolates, Guinness and Bovril, and his series of advertisements for the Underground Electric Railway Company (the London Underground) were very well known; his work as a wartime propagandist includes the poster for which he is known above all, the Lord Kitchener poster design, which first appeared on the cover of the weekly magazine London Opinion on 5 September 1914. "His prolific output was characterized by its humour, keen observation of the everyday, and an eye for strong design"

He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at his home in London on 17 June 1933, and is buried in Milton Road Cemetery in Weston-super-Mare.

Leete's lord Kitchener poster is one of the most famous war recruitment images,it's still hangs on the Walls of schools,it seems as though the eyes of kitchener follow you no matter were you stand in the room.The simplicity of the image shows authority singling the viewer out.

William Roberts

In 1916 Roberts enlisted in the Royal Artillery as a gunner, serving on the Western Front. Having been told that artists were being chosen to do war paintings for the Canadian War Records Office, he applied, and in 1918 was 'loaned' to the Canadians for six months as an official war artist. He was subsequently also commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, for whom he painted A Shell Dump, France (1918–19; Imperial War Museum, London).His experiences at the front – touched upon in his memoir '4.5 Howitzer Gunner' – shifted the direction of his work, and significant pieces from his wartime output, such as the powerful Canadian commission The First German Gas Attack at Ypres (1918), dramatically depict the horror of war and are possibly the most acerbic produced by any of the British artists employed under the government’s schemes. Indeed they are bitter enough to rival the social realism of the German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz, and are possibly in a class of their own for their portrayal of the arduous – and occasionally deadly – life in the firing lines.

Roberts war pieces almost seem playful yet they tell a story of the destruction and devastation caused by the first world war,his colour choice is bright and very out there,whereas alot of other war artist use dull dark colours such as black and grey.

Sir John lavery

Lavery was appointed an official artist in the First World War. Ill-health, however, prevented him from travelling to the Western Front. A serious car crash during a Zeppelin bombing raid also kept him from fulfilling this role as war artist. He remained in Britain and mostly painted boats, planes and airships. During the war years he was a close friend of the Asquith family and spent time with them at their Sutton Courtenay Thames-side residence, painting their portraits and idyllic pictures like Summer on the River (Hugh Lane Gallery).

After the war he was knighted[1] and in 1921 he was elected to the Royal Academy. During this time, he and his wife both became interested in their Irish heritage and were tangentially involved in both the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War: they gave the use of their London home to the Irish negotiators during the Treaty negotiations. After Michael Collins was killed, Lavery painted Michael Collins, Love of Ireland, now in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery.

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931) was an Irish portrait painter, who worked mainly in London. He was also a war artist

Like Sir John Lavery, Orpen was an official war painter of the First World War. In 1917 he travelled to the Western Front and produced drawings and paintings of privates, dead soldiers and German prisoners of war along with official portraits of generals and politicians. His large paintings of the Versaille Peace Conference captured the political wranglings and the vainglory of the gathered politicians and statesmen, whom Orpen came to loathe but relied upon for post-war commissions. Most of these works, 138 in all, he gave to the British government on the understanding that they should be framed in simple white frames and kept together as a single body of work. They are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London. For his war work, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 1918 King's birthday honours list.[1] He was elected a Royal Academician (member of the Royal Academy of Arts) in 1919.[2]

He was deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed in the war and his 'To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France first exhibited in 1923 showed a flag draped coffin flanked by a pair of ghostly and wretched soldiers clothed only in tattered blankets. Although widely admired by the public, this picture was attacked by the press and Orpen painted out the soldiers before the painting, which had originally been dedicated to Field Marshal Haig, was accepted by the Imperial War Museum in 1927.

Orpen had amazing skill in bringing the painting to life capturing the scene like a photograph,the simplicity of his paintings is what inspires me he paints what he sees.

Bruce bairnsfather

Captain (Charles) Bruce Bairnsfather (9 July 1887 – 29 September 1959) was a prominent British humorist and cartoonist. His best-known cartoon character is Old Bill. Bill and his pals Bert and Alf featured in Bairnsfather's weekly "Fragments from France" cartoons published weekly in "The Bystander" magazine during the First World War.

In 1914 he joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and served with a machine gun unit in France until 1915, when he was hospitalised with shell shock and hearing damage sustained during the Second Battle of Ypres. Posted to the 34th Division headquarters on Salisbury Plain, he developed his humorous series for the Bystander about life in the trenches, featuring "Old Bill", a curmudgeonly soldier with trademark walrus moustache and balaclava. The best remembered of these shows Bill with another trooper in a muddy shell hole with shells whizzing all around. The other trooper is grumbling and Bill advises::

‘If you know of a better ‘ole go to it’.

Many of his cartoons from this period were collected in Fragments From France (1914) and the autobiographical Bullets & Billets (1916).[1]

Despite the immense popularity with the troops and massive sales increase for the Bystander, initially there were objections to the "vulgar caricature". Nevertheless, their success in raising morale led to Bairnsfather's promotion and receipt of a War Office appointment to draw similar cartoons for other Allies forces.

Paul Nash

Paul Nash (11 May 1889 – 11 July 1946) was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.

At the outbreak of World War I, Nash reluctantly enlisted in the Artists' Rifles and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. A few days before the Ypres offensive he fell into a trench. He broke a rib and was invalided home. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from his front-line sketches to produce a series of drawings of the war. This work, which shows the influence of the literary magazine BLAST and the Vorticist movement of which it was a manifesto, was well-received when exhibited later that year at the Goupil Gallery.

As a result of this exhibition, Nevinson advised Nash to approach Charles Masterman, head of the government's War Propaganda Bureau (WPB). Nash was recruited as an official war artist, and in November 1917 he returned to the Western Front where his drawings resulted in his first oil paintings. Nash's work during the war included The Menin Road, We Are Making a New World, The Ypres Salient at Night, The Mule Track, A Howitzer Firing, Ruined Country and Spring in the Trenches. They are some of the most powerful and enduring images of the Great War painted by an English artist.[3]

Nash used his opportunity as a war artist to bring home the full horrors of the conflict. As he wrote to his wife from the front on 16 November 1917:

"I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls."

Nash is a very inspirational artist, he's able to create master pieces from the devastation of war.

Paddy Hartley

  Paddy Hartley’s career, a constant theme of investigation in his work is the way in which the human body is changed, modified and reconfigured either by choice or circumstance. Addressing subjects such as steroid use in bodybuilding, the discourse between faith groups and biomedical research, the ethics of human cloning and conflict acquired injury. His work has taken the form of installation, ceramic, assembled objects, garment creation and modification and digital embroidery. Hartley is a fashion designer who creates spectacular garments using the disfigurement participants in the war and how it affects them and their physical form. Paddy tells the person's story on a garment from there time in the war to the recovery.

 Hartley is a fashion designer who creates spectacular garments using the disfigurement participants in the war and how it affects them and their physical form. Paddy tells the person's story on a garment from there time in the war to the recovery. Masks made from various fabrics are used to recreate the effect of the treatment, creating a hauntingly beautiful effect on the facial features of the model.

Paddy Hartley inspires me as he has the ability to turn devastation of the war effects into beautiful garment, his unique style,structure and visual effect of his garments is simply breathtaking.

Perhaps

Perhaps by Vera Brittain 

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.

Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.'

But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.


(To R A L)Roland Aubrey Leighton


For the project I'm doing at the moment we had a choice of 4 poems to create a garment around, I chose this poem because of the raw emotion she feels after losing her husband.

make do and mend

In this project I'm going to be researching war. Propaganda art has really caught my eye because of its use of subliminal messages within its colours, layout,text and image.Throughout this project I'm going to be researching various areas of the war from evacuation to the woman left at home.