Gassed

[JohnRatzenberger]

Gassed by John Singer Sargent has long captivated me. On at least 3 separate trips to the IWM, I have sat at looked at it for up to an hour. It is, to me, one of the most enduring images to come out of World War 1.

The IWM Non-commercial License does not permit alteration of the image, so I cannot crop or focus to highlight certain things.



Sargent, John Singer, Gassed; Imperial War Museum, London, UK; the image above and description following were obtained from the Imperial War Museum online collection and are used under the IWM Non-Commercial License: © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1460). http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/23722;

The scene is the aftermath of a mustard gas attack on the Western Front in August 1918 as witnessed by the artist and shows a side-on view of a line of soldiers being led along a duckboard by a medical orderly. Their eyes are bandaged as a result of exposure to gas and each man holds on to the shoulder of the man in front. One of the line has his leg raised in an exaggerated posture as though walking up a step, and another veers out of the line with his back to the viewer. There is another line of temporarily blinded soldiers in the background, one soldier leaning over vomiting onto the ground. More gas-affected men lie in the foreground, one of them drinking from a water-bottle. The crowd of wounded soldiers continues on the far side of the duckboard, and the tent ropes of a dressing station are visible in the right of the composition. A football match is being played in the background, lit by the evening sun.


I have attempted to interpret, not duplicate, that image using two Tommy's War kits - TW54S02 "Gassed", a subset of the painting, and TW54A02 "Nurse, Voluntary Aid Detachment", a single figure.

Tommy's War did not portray the entire painting and in particular left out the Medical Orderly who I considered central to the image so I used the VAD Nurse instead. I thought her uniform provided a nice counterpoint. I changed the order of the six figures provided from (1,2,3,4,5,6) to (2,1,3,4,6,5), modified the VAD Nurse so both arms supported the modified right arm of the lead figure, and made minor arm position adjustments to the other figures. I used Vallejo and AK paints and washes, all hand-brushed.









I was under a time crunch, I really wish I had time to make some sort of tent entrance to enhance the composition and storyline and to do a better job painting the VAD Nurse. I might go back and enhance it later, but for now it was good enough for a Silver medal in Intermediate Diorama at the 2016 AMPS show.

I have done a couple vignettes at AMPS (like a diorama but no storyline) but this is my first attempt at a diorama. In either case I am using them to challenge myself to become a better figure modeler, something I have shied away from for decades.

[iggie]

Very evocative work John, and worthy of such a prize. It captures the mood and the story of the original painting totally......very impressive

[JamesPerrin]

Powerful stuff John

[chrism]

Very nice and evocative, well done on the competition win

[PTB11]

A sterling piece of work, John.

[DH-Drover]

Great work but missing a bit of mud on the troops boots etc.
However much better than I could do.

Dai

[JohnRatzenberger]

Good point, Dai, but if my photos were better you'd see muddy trousers from about waist down and mud on the duckboards.

I deliberated about the degree of mud (IMO the original painting is more dusty than muddy), but then decided these soldiers had already been through at least one stage of medical aid and clean up -- their wounds bandaged, some uniform removed, etc, and were now on to be treated for gas. Also they could have been gassed while waiting to go over the top, admittedly not mud-free, but ....

And, I barely finished in time and the last thing I needed was to screw things up by slopping mud around. I had already had a gotcha when the semi-gloss I put over the nurse pulled some blue up onto the white apron and I had to attempt to fix it -- unsuccessfully it turned out as I took a few hits because the nurse wasn't as well done as the others ....

[Clashcityrocker]

Cool. Nice way to avoid painting all those eyes too.
Just kidding.
We will remember them.

Nigel

[JohnRatzenberger]

Cool. Nice way to avoid painting all those eyes too.

That thought was ever present as I worked on it

[splash]

stunning inspirational work.

The look on the young nurses face says it all, work like this belongs in a museum or an art gallery, I showed the images to my wife and she was speechless and that's not any easy task to pull off.

Thanks for sharing.

[Old_Tonto]

That's a beautiful tribute to those injured soldiers John.
Congrats on your award too.

[Dazzled]

Very atmospheric and a great vignette.

[Purplethistle]

A very moving tribute John, especially as my own Grandfather was eventually invalided out by a gas attack having previously been out of the line for a year, recovering from a shrapnel wound from abdomen to chest. The medics apparently used his belt to hold him together on route to the aid post. He returned to his old job....(as a gas lighter!) and lived to 73 years. A reminder of how precarious a thread it is that led to my own existence (My Father was wounded in the aorta by a rifle bullet ricochet that was too risky to remove as it was essentially plugging the hole)

[JohnRatzenberger]

Thank you everyone for the kind words.

[ShaunW]

That is a truly excellent piece of work John and more than worthy of its award. A powerful and emotive painting capturing one of the true horrors of modern warfare that I feel you have translated faultlessly into model form.