In this clip from War Art with Eddie Redmayne, the actor and art enthusiast looks at the work of John Singer Sargent, particularly his painting titled 'Gassed'. Eddie feels the emotional impact of the painting which depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War. He compares Sargent's own personal experience of war compared to his piers such as Paul Nash and how a trip to the frontline and the human suffering behind the firing line inspired the war painting. Watch War Art with Eddie Redmayne on BBC Select: US Amazon Prime Video Channels: https://amzn.to/3IiN5Cq The Apple TV app: https://apple.co/3MT7O3d The Roku Channel: https://bit.ly/3waewMn Canada: Amazon Prime Video Channels: https://bit.ly/34JegZm The Apple TV app: https://apple.co/3w9WABI
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Another artist commissioned for the memorial was John Singer Sargent.
I don't think I've ever seen a canvas that forces you into a mood of reflection
quite as much as this does. It's everything about it, it's the scale
which is cinematic, it's so vast and the figures are human scale that you're forced to engage
but also the mood is extraordinary, the light reflecting on this devastating scene.
These bodies of men temporarily blinded by mustard gas and behind it a group of guys
playing football. It's as if they're in another world. The extraordinary thing for me is how
different Sargent was to Nash and Nevinson. He was a different generation, he was wealthy,
he was a society painter, he had huge amounts of success and so he hadn't suffered at the front
like Nash and Nevinson had and in fact when he got this commission he did go up to the front and he
wrote this brilliant thing which was that the further one goes, he wrote, the more scattered
and meagre everything is. The nearer to danger, the fewer and more hidden the men, the more dramatic
the situation, the more it becomes an empty landscape. The Ministry of Information expects an epic
and how can one do an epic without masses of men? So he went behind the firing line to this place
where all these men who were suffering from mustard gas attacks were coming back to
to find this landscape and the horror in the landscape of just piles of bodies of
of suffering men and that's kind of extraordinary to me, the sort of antithesis of Nash.
