: Artists & Makers

The most ambitious print project of the First World War

This exhibition presents the complete print series, The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals. These sixty-six prints were produced by the British government in 1917 as artistic propaganda with the aim of encouraging a war-weary public and raising support for the war effort.

Eighteen artists contributed to the series, including Augustus John, George Clausen and Frank Brangwyn – some of the most celebrated artists of the time.

As a government commission, the artists did not have full artistic freedom. They were given their subjects and each image had to pass censorship regulations.

The prints are divided into two sets of portfolios, ‘Ideals’ and ‘Efforts’. The ‘Ideals’ address the question of why Britain was at war and what it aimed to achieve. These images are dramatic and symbolic, such as The Freedom of the Seas and The Triumph of Democracy. The ‘Efforts’ illustrate some of the activities of the war effort, the means by which Britain was to achieve the ‘Ideals’. The Efforts are separated into nine subject headings, each depicting a different activity or theme.

Producing and Exhibiting

These prints were commissioned by Wellington House, a government department secretly set up to produce propaganda. The project was managed by the artist Thomas Derrick (1885–1954), and the printing carried out under the direction of the artist and contributor F. Ernest Jackson (1872–1945). The printer was Avenue Press, London.

The contributing artists were paid well, each receiving £210 (about £10,000 today) with the possibility of further royalties from sales. The prints were a limited edition of two hundred. The ‘Efforts’ were sold for £2 2s 0d (£100) each and the ‘Ideals’ for £10 10s 0d (£500).

As a government commission, the artists did not have full artistic freedom. They were given their subjects and each image had to pass censorship regulations.

The series was first exhibited at the Fine Art Society, London in July 1917, followed by regional art galleries around Britain. It was also shown in France and in America, where the majority of the portfolios were sent to be exhibited and sold.

Contemporary Reaction to Prints

“The very soul of the war is to be read in the set of sixty-six brilliant lithographs.”   
(The Illustrated London News, 1917)

These prints were commissioned as propaganda with the specific aim of raising civilian morale and manipulating public opinion towards the First World War in Britain and abroad. In 1917, after three years of hard fighting and unprecedented loss of life, the government needed a new way to maintain public support for the war. These prints were designed to remind people of the aims and objectives, and emphasise the importance of patriotic duty.

It is hard to know whether the prints were successful as propaganda. They were widely published when first exhibited in 1917. Some journalists supported the message, “To see these lithographs is a patriotic as well as an artistic duty” (Burton Daily Mail, Feb 15, 1918). Others were not so positive, “their efforts are in almost every instance sincere; yet the result is, on the whole, meagre and unsatisfying.” (The Daily Telegraph, 20 July 1917). In America, the reaction initially seemed positive, ‘they have been a revelation to American Fifth Avenue art patrons, dealer, critics…They put up British prestige’. However, prints sales there did not meet expectations and a loss was made on the project as a whole.

Lithography and the Senefelder Club

‘The most brilliant of the younger men are all now making remarkable lithographs…there is a genuine renaissance of the art’ (Joseph Pennell, 1914)

Lithography is a printing technique based on the principle that oil and water do not mix. An artist draws an image onto a smooth surface, traditionally a limestone, with a greasy material. Ink is then rolled onto the surface, it is attracted to the drawing, but repelled by the dampened un-drawn areas. Paper is laid down on the stone and run through a press. Different effects can be achieved using different greasy materials to draw. These can imitate a chalk or pencil drawing or even watercolour. Many of these prints were produced using a ‘transfer’ method, where a drawing made on special paper is transferred to the stone, rather than working on it directly. For colour lithographs, the artist begins with the design on a key-stone using one colour. Any further colours require a different stone, inked up and printed one on top of another.

Many of the contributing artists were members of the Senefelder club, a small club set up in 1908 to encourage and revive artistic lithography. It was named after the 18th century German inventor of the process. This portfolio was produced at a time of a revival of interest in the artistic opportunities of lithography.

Making Soldiers

Bringing in Prisoners - Eric Kennington

Over the Top - Eric Kennington

Into the Trenches - Eric Kennington

Ready for Service - Eric Kennington

The Gas Mask - Eric Kennington

Bayonet Practice - Eric Kennington

Showing soldiers in training and at the Front, one journalist described these prints as capturing ‘the spirit of our new, young army’. Kennington was probably chosen for this subject as he had himself enlisted with the 13th (Kensington) Battalion London Regiment and fought on the Western Front, France, 1914-1915. He was wounded and discharged as unfit in 1915. These prints do not attempt to depict the horror and tragedy of war; as in most of his war art, Kennington instead champions the common soldier.

Kennington was born in Chelsea, London, the son of a well-known portrait artist. He studied at St Paul’s Art School, the Lambeth School of Art and the City and Guilds School. He was appointed an official war artist from 1917-1919 and again in 1940-1943, painting portraits of sailors and airmen.

Making Guns

Lifting an Inner Tube - George Clausen

The Radial Crane - George Clausen

Turning a Big Gun - George Clausen

The Great Hammer - George Clausen

The Furnace - George Clausen

Where the Guns are made - George Clausen

Clausen researched this set of prints at the Royal Gun Factory, Woolwich Arsenal, London, which manufactured armaments, ammunition and explosives for the British Armed Forces. At its peak during the First World War it employed around 80,000 people and extended over 1,30 acres. Clausen was appointed an official war artist in 1917. As an older artist he did not go to the Front line, instead recording activities on the home front.

Clausen was born in London to George Clausen Senior, a decorative painter of Danish descent. He attended the Royal College of Art and South Kensington art schools, then the Académie Julian in Paris. He was a founding member of the New English Art Club and was elected Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1904. He was knighted in 1927.

Building Aircraft

Swooping down on a Taube - Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Banking at 4,000 feet - Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

In the air - Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Acetylene Welder - Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Assembling Parts - Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Making the Engine - Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Nevinson’s prints were particularly admired when first exhibited. He ‘contrives to make the visitor almost giddy’, one critic wrote, another that he possessed ‘the power of expressing sensations rather than visual facts’.

Nevinson studied lithography under Ernest Jackson in 1912. At the outbreak of war he volunteered as an ambulance driver, an experience which deeply affected him. He was appointed an official war artist in 1917. These prints follow the process of building aircraft from making parts to assembly and flight. Acetylene Welder and Assembling parts both show the growing contribution of women workers.

Nevinson was born in London to the war correspondent and journalist Henry Nevinson. He studied at the Slade School and in Paris. He is one of the most renowned war artists of the period. His work was influenced by avant-garde European art movements such as Cubism and Futurism, yet slowly moved to a more realist style as he attempted to portray conflict.

Tending the Wounded

Casualty Clearing Station in France - Claude Shepperson

Convalescence in England - Claude Shepperson

In Hospital in England - Claude Shepperson

Detraining in England - Claude Shepperson

On Board a Hospital Transport - Claude Shepperson

Advanced Dressing Station in France - Claude Shepperson

These prints follow the journey of a wounded soldier from the Front Line, through treatment, to convalescence back at home. The organisers initially asked the artist Henry Tonks (1867-1937), a surgeon before becoming an artist, to respond to the work of the medical services. However, Tonks found the paper supplied ‘entirely unsympathetic’for drawing and declined. Shepperson was later commissioned for the subject and produced a very well received series.

Shepperson was born in Beckenham, Kent, and was a successful water-colourist, pen and ink artist, illustrator and lithographer. Having given up law he studied art in Paris and London. He is well-known for his humorous drawings contributed to the Punch magazine between 1905 and 1920.

Transport by Sea

The Place of Safety - Charles Pears

Maintaining Forces Overseas - Charles Pears

Transporting Troops - Charles Pears

Supplying the Navy - Charles Pears

Maintaining Export Trade - Charles Pears

Maintaining Food Supplies - Charles Pears

The merchant navy undertook vital tasks during the war, supporting naval ships, transporting troops and carrying essential supplies. It was dangerous work and the fleet suffered great losses. Pears’ images capture the ships in great detail.

Pears was born in Pontefract, Yorkshire and, although he worked as a successful illustrator and lithographer, is best known for his marine paintings. During the First World War Pears was a commissioned officer in the Royal Marines, and worked as an official naval artist from 1914-1918, and again in 1940. Throughout his career he was also a popular poster designer, creating works for organisations including the London Underground.

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows 1831
John Constable (1776 – 1837)
Photograph © Tate, London 2013

Purchased by Tate with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, The Manton Foundation and the Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation) and Tate Members in partnership with Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales, Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service, National Galleries of Scotland; and Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

When this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Constable quoted nine lines from The Four Seasons: Summer (1727) by Scottish poet James Thompson to expand on its meaning.

As from the face of heaven the scatter’d clouds 
Tumultous rove, th’interminable sky 
Sublimer swells, and o’er the world expands 
A purer azure. Through the lightened air 
A higher lustre and a clearer calm 
Diffusive tremble; while, as if in sign 
Of danger past, a glittering robe of joy, 
Set off abundant by the yellow ray, 
Invests the fields, and nature smiles reviv’d

James Thompson, The Seasons: Summer (1727)

The poem tells the mythical tale of young lovers Celadon and Amelia. As they walk through the woods in a thunderstorm, the tragic Amelia is struck by lightning, and dies in her lover’s arms. The poem has a religious message: it is an exploration of God’s power, and man’s inability to control his own fate. It is also a poem of hope and redemption. The rainbow appears as a ‘sign of danger past’.

The story of Celadon and Amelia has clear resonances with Constable’s own tragic loss. His wife Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828, after just twelve years of marriage. It is likely that the poem had special significance for the young couple. When Maria was unsure whether or not she should marry Constable, he quoted lines from the poem to her, to allay her fears.

Shirley Jones, Nocturne for Wales (1987). Cwmparc Colliery, Rhondda Valley. (c). Shirley Jones

Shirley Jones, Llym Awel (1993). A raven picking at the dead after a battle. (c) Shirley Jones

Shirley Jones, A Thonnau Gwyllt y Môr / And the Wild Waves of the Sea (2011). Worm's Head, Gower. (c) Shirley Jones

An 'artist's book' is defined as one created or conceived by an individual artist. Some of the best contemporary examples from Wales are the works of Shirley Jones.

Born in the Rhondda Valley, and after studying English literature at the university in Cardiff, Shirley Jones undertook courses in printmaking in the early 1970s, with advanced study in printmaking at Croydon Art College in Surrey in 1975-6. She set up her own studio and began to produce her own books in 1977, and from 1983 she took the name Red Hen Press. In 1994 she moved back to Wales and established her studio in Llanhamlach, near Brecon.

Shirley Jones's books are virtually all her own work, the text often her own poems and recollections, or translations from the Welsh and even Old English, all printed on hand- or mould- made paper. The books may be bound and also housed in tailor-made boxes, all created by well-known binders. Her first productions appeared in very small numbers. For example, her first work, as a student, was Words and Prints, which appeared in 1975 and ran to just six copies. Twelve copies of the second book, Windows (1977), were produced and the third, The Same Sun, (1978), ran to twenty-five copies. Greek Dance (1980) appeared in an edition of forty, and most of Shirley Jones's later works appeared in editions of twenty-five to anything up to fifty copies. The particular attraction of her books is the illustrations, whether aquatints, etchings or mezzotints.

There has always been a great demand for Red Hen Press books in the United States of America, where over sixty institutions hold copies of Shirley Jones's books, with thirteen holding ten or more titles. In the United Kingdom, eleven institutions collect her work, including Brecknock Museum & Art Gallery, with ten or more titles held by the British Library, the National Library of Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru. Copies are also to be found in libraries and universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and South Africa.

Amgueddfa Cymru's Library began to take note of the Red Hen Press in 1999, when it acquired Nocturne for Wales (1987), Llym Awel (1993), Falls the Shadow (1995) and Etched in Autumn (1997). The Library has acquired all her work since that date, and later purchased two of Shirley Jones's earlier books: Five Flowers for my Father (1990) and Two Moons (1991).

Thirty copies were produced of A Thonnau Gwyllt y Môr / And the Wild Waves of the Sea (2011). The book has an introductory essay and includes three aquatints and two mezzotints of the coasts and islands of Wales that accompany the poems. Of the other titles, Etched Out (2003) is the story of the people of the Epynt area of Breconshire who were moved from their homes during the Second World War, as the land was required for the military. The names of fifty farms are recorded on a pull-out mezzotint, with some of the figures depicted being based on images in St Fagans National History Museum. Some of the paper used was custom-made, making use of the red soil of the Epynt.

One of Shirley Jones's most dramatic images is to be found in Two Moons, and this mezzotint, one of nine, is to be seen on the cover of the book published to mark thirty years of the Red Hen Press: Shirley Jones and the Red Hen Press: a Bibliography, compiled by Ronald D. Patkus, Vassar College, University of Vermont (2013).

Y Cyfarchiad I Fair

, a watercolour of about1963, set on a Welsh hillside, and linking the Annunciation to the Celtic myth of redemption.

Frontispiece to 'In Parenthesis', 1937, the Christ-like figure of the common man, caught in the predicament of war.

Capel-y-ffin

, a watercolour of 1926-7, given by David Jones to Eric Gill.

Trystan ac Essylt

, a highly complex watercolour completed in 1963, showing the doomed lovers of Arthurian legend.

David Jones was more profoundly influenced throughout his life by the landscape, language and myths of Wales than any of his contemporaries. An extraordinary and multi-talented man, he occupies a unique place in twentieth-century British art, and is often called the greatest painter-poet since William Blake.

It may seem a paradox that David Jones was born a Londoner, visited Wales regularly for just four years between 1924 and 1928, and never made his home here. But then until the 1950s almost all Welsh artists were obliged to make their careers largely outside Wales.

Senior Curator, Beth McIntyre explores the visual world of David Jones for Welsh National Opera

Jones's father came from Holywell in Flintshire, and passed on a deep sense of his Welsh identity to his son, who was to devote a lifetime to the study of a Welsh culture that he felt was lost to him. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he was determined to join a Welsh regiment. He was wounded on the Somme in that Welsh epic, the battle of Mametz Wood. After three years at Westminster School of Art he joined a community of Catholic craftsmen at Ditchling in Sussex. One of its leaders was the sculptor, typographer and engraver Eric Gill, who was to have a pronounced influence on how he thought about art. He became engaged to Gill's daughter Petra for a while, and went with him when he moved his family from Ditchling to Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. There Jones found himself as a painter, primarily in watercolour. He developed a personal and modernist vision of the Breconshire landscape that has its roots in the art of Cézanne and Van Gogh. During these years (1924-1928) Jones also spent time with his parents in the London suburb of Brockley, and at the Benedictine monastery on Caldy Island.

In 1927 he was commissioned to make a set of copper engravings to illustrate Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the following year he was elected a member of the modernist exhibiting group the 7 & 5 Society. Late in 1932, when he had nearly completed his intricate, poetic narrative of his experience of the First World War, In Parenthesis, he had a nervous breakdown, and found it increasingly difficult to paint. He also turned his back on the modernist art world as it moved closer to abstraction, and spent most of the 1930s holed up in a small hotel in Sidmouth.

In Parenthesis was published in 1937, and is now regarded as one of the great achievements of British literary modernism, alongside the works of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. More poetry followed, and he was also painting more during the Second World War. His work comprising large watercolours - delicate, highly detailed, scholarly, and representational - which often took months to complete. In 1945 he began to work on lettering and to paint inscriptions, drawing on passages from literary works in a mix of Latin, Welsh and Old English. He had another breakdown after the Second World War, and from 1948 he lived in a single room in boarding houses in Harrow.

His inspirations, in both painting and in poetry, were his Catholicism, and especially the central mystery of the Mass, and the 'matter of Britain' the Arthurian Legends and the history of post-Roman Britain.

His late paintings are uniquely personal, being richly worked and full of allusions to theology, history and legend. His meditation The Anathemata, one of the great long poems of the twentieth century, was published in 1951.

Two of his last great paintings encapsulate his post-war achievement, Y Cyfarchiad i Fair or The Greeting to Mary and Trystan ac Essylt, both dating from 1963. The first shows the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin, who is seated in a garden within a landscape based on that around Capel-y-ffin. The second, over which he laboured for three years, depicts the central drama of the legend of Trystan and Essylt, when King Mark's knight and his master's bride drink a fatal love potion on their voyage from Ireland to Cornwall, and is full of richly complex iconographical detail.

Why then was this strange, shy, lonely man one of the greatest and most influential Welsh artists of the twentieth century? It is, I believe, because he identified so passionately with the idea of Wales, and of the importance of its language and culture to the shared experience of Britain over the last two thousand years. Jones was part of Wales's growing political and cultural consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s (a friend and correspondent was Saunders Lewis, a co-founder of Plaid Cymru). His work was seen here, for example in a major touring exhibition organised by the Welsh Arts Council in 1954, and he was awarded a gold medal by the National Eisteddfod in 1964. He shows us how an artist can develop a Welsh voice far beyond mere representation of place.

Graham Sutherland c.1940
© Estate of Graham Sutherland

SUTHERLAND, Graham
Pastoral, 1930 (NWM A 4042)
© Estate of Graham Sutherland

SUTHERLAND, Graham
Welsh Landscape, 1936 (NWM A 4403) © Estate of Graham Sutherland

SUTHERLAND, Graham
Feeding a Furnace, 1942 (NWM A 4628) © Estate of Graham Sutherland

SUTHERLAND, Graham
Untitled (Wavelike Form), 1976 (NMW A 2271) © Estate of Graham Sutherland

SUTHERLAND, Graham
Study of a Palm Frond, 1947 (NWM A 4101)

Graham Sutherland was celebrated as the 'outstanding painter of his generation'. The places in which Sutherland worked had a profound influence on his work: from the rural landscape of Kent, to the hills and valleys of west Wales and the heat and light of the French Riviera.

Sutherland trained as a printmaker at Goldsmiths in the mid 1920s. Many of his early prints show his enthusiasm for the pastoral work of Samuel Palmer.

Trees and woods are enduring motifs in Sutherland's work, from the nostalgic countryside scenes of his earliest prints, through to the blasted and tortured forms of his later images. They often become like creatures, capable of expressing emotion and physical sensation. Gradually Sutherland's vision began to take on a more personal style and note of menace.

Sutherland in Wales

He first visited Pembrokeshire in 1934 and said it was the place where he 'began to learn painting'. He recalled being fascinated by 'twisted gorse on the cliff edge... the flowers and damp hollows... the deep green valleys and the rounded hills and the whole structure, simple and complex'. Sutherland discovered in Pembrokeshire a landscape of 'exultant strangeness' but also felt that he was 'as much part of the earth as my features were part of me'.

Following the outbreak of World War Two, Sutherland was appointed an Official War Artist. He recorded war work at mines, steel works and quarries in Cornwall, South Wales and Derbyshire, and the devastation of bomb-damaged Cardiff, Swansea, London and northern France.

Sutherland visited steel works in Cardiff and Swansea in 1941 and 1942. He imaged the workings of the foundries to be like living creatures. He wrote: 'as the hand feeds the mouth so did the long scoops which plunged into the furnace openings feed them, and the metal containers pouring molten iron into ladles had great encrusted mouths.'

Describing his first experience of the south of France in 1947 Sutherland recalled that: 'To see Provence for the first time is to know

Sutherland quickly took to both the sunny climate and the intriguing appearance of the region's plants and animals. In 1956 he and his wife bought a modernist villa designed by the Irish architect Eileen Gray. Sutherland was to live in this house, on a hillside of the coastal town of Menton for much of the year for the rest of his life.

In France, Sutherland discovered an array of new inspirational forms. Palms, gourds, maize and root-forms were all studied, dissected and reassembled into new arrangements. These increasingly took on the quality of creatures or figures caught in a process of metamorphosis. Palm leaves suggest the sun, heat and foreignness of the south of France. After the hardship and drabness of the war years they must have seemed exotic. However, they signify more than the simple enjoyment of a holiday destination. The razor-sharp frond edges recall the spikiness of Sutherland's earlier thorn studies. They suggest the potential for the co-existence of pleasure and pain.

In 1967 Sutherland returned to west Wales for the first time in over 30 years. Nearly a decade later when he had once again been working regularly in the region, he explained that he had been 'sorely mistaken' in his assumption that he had exhausted the inspiration the place had to offer. Instead he had again soaked himself in the 'curiously charged atmosphere — at once both calm and exciting'.

Sutherland wanted to leave a collection to Wales because he felt 'having gained so much from this country, I should like to give something back'. In 1976 he established the Graham Sutherland Gallery at Picton Castle where the majority of this collection was held before its transfer to Amgueddfa Cymru in 1995.

This article was produced by Rachel Flynn as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Collaborative Doctoral Award with Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales and the University of Bristol.

View a list of works by

External Links

Oriel y Parc