Study for 'An Advanced Dressing Station in France'

This drawing is a study for An Advanced Dressing Station in France, 1918, in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, and depicts the wounded soldiers on the right side of the painting's composition. The oil is one of a series of paintings commissioned by the British War Memorial Committee set up by the Ministry of Information early in 1918. The Committee developed a scheme to build a ‘Great memorial gallery’ devoted to ‘fighting subjects, home subjects and the war at sea and in the air’. The centre of the scheme was to be a series of paintings based on the dimensions of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery, London (72 x 125 inches), this size being considered suitable for a commemorative battle painting. The Hall of Remembrance was never completed and the collection was given to the Imperial War Museum.

Henry Tonks was the drawing master at the Slade School of Art, whose influence is evident in the work of his students including Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and C.R.W. Nevinson. Also a surgeon, Tonks recorded the injuries of soldiers during the First World War in his role for the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the subject of An Advanced Dressing Station in France made Tonks an apt choice to depict this scene.