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Lot Essay
In August 1917 Kennington was posted to France as an Official War Artist for the Ministry of Information, where he was briefed to depict the soldiers on the front in charcoal and pastel. He returned to London in March 1918, having produced over 160 portraits of the soldiers and the conditions in which they lived, fought and died.
At the end of that year Kennington joined the Canadian War Records Scheme as an Official War Artist in eastern France and Belgium, alongside his contemporaries Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth. It was during this time that Kennington executed the present work, a poignant depiction of a soldier's grave on the battlefield, marked by a makeshift wooden cross and the soldier's gun and helmet, around which a tangle of ivy has grown. He returned to this motif again in 1925 in his Soissons Memorial to the Missing, in which the gun and helmet form a more stylised centrepiece to this trinity of soldiers.
Kennington's one-man exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery in October 1920 confirmed his reputation as one of Britain's leading draughtsmen and portraitists, and it is likely that the present work was included in this show. On 31 October 1920 the art critic of the Observer, P.G. Konody, remarked that Kennington's drawings were 'among the best of their period. With all their incisive crystalline clearness few can rival him in the exploitation of the possibilities of the pastel medium' (cited in J. Black, The Sculpture of Eric Kennington, Much Hadham, 2002, p. 27). In the Alpine Club Gallery exhibition catalogue the first work listed is simply marked with a poem:
'This is the grave of man. No monument
Of patriot mourned by King and Parliament.
But it and the obscure and hurrying hand
That thrust it up have long since left the land
For the trim parks of heroes neatly planted
Through which the admiring tourist moves enchanted'.
We are very grateful to Dr Jonathan Black for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
At the end of that year Kennington joined the Canadian War Records Scheme as an Official War Artist in eastern France and Belgium, alongside his contemporaries Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth. It was during this time that Kennington executed the present work, a poignant depiction of a soldier's grave on the battlefield, marked by a makeshift wooden cross and the soldier's gun and helmet, around which a tangle of ivy has grown. He returned to this motif again in 1925 in his Soissons Memorial to the Missing, in which the gun and helmet form a more stylised centrepiece to this trinity of soldiers.
Kennington's one-man exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery in October 1920 confirmed his reputation as one of Britain's leading draughtsmen and portraitists, and it is likely that the present work was included in this show. On 31 October 1920 the art critic of the Observer, P.G. Konody, remarked that Kennington's drawings were 'among the best of their period. With all their incisive crystalline clearness few can rival him in the exploitation of the possibilities of the pastel medium' (cited in J. Black, The Sculpture of Eric Kennington, Much Hadham, 2002, p. 27). In the Alpine Club Gallery exhibition catalogue the first work listed is simply marked with a poem:
'This is the grave of man. No monument
Of patriot mourned by King and Parliament.
But it and the obscure and hurrying hand
That thrust it up have long since left the land
For the trim parks of heroes neatly planted
Through which the admiring tourist moves enchanted'.
We are very grateful to Dr Jonathan Black for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.