毒ガスをあびて

John Singer Sargent · 1919

A line of young soldiers, eyes bandaged, blinded by gas, is led by an orderly toward a dressing station at sunset. Around their feet lie the wounded. Sargent saw this scene himself in August 1918.

The story behind the painting

In May 1918 the British War Memorials Committee asked Sargent, an American, to paint a large work on Anglo-American co-operation. At 62 he went to the Western Front with Henry Tonks. He wrote that the Ministry expected an epic, and that one of the few fine subjects with masses of men was a harrowing sight: a field full of gassed and blindfolded men. That was on 21 August 1918, at a dressing station at Le Bac-du-Sud near Arras. Tonks recalled the gassed men led in parties of about six by an orderly, on a fine evening with the sun setting.

What to look for

The canvas is huge, 231 by 611 cm, and the central group of eleven soldiers is nearly life-size. Ten blinded men walk in a line along a duckboard toward the dressing station, marked by ropes on the right, guided by an orderly. Dead and wounded men lie all around them, and a second line of wounded advances behind. Look up: biplanes fight in the evening sky, the moon rises, and in the distance uninjured men play football in blue and red shirts, as if unconcerned by the suffering beside them.

Meaning and intent

The tall, blond soldiers form a frieze with the feel of a religious procession. Sargent recalls Bruegel's The Parable of the Blind and Rodin's Burghers of Calais. The painting is a powerful testimony to chemical weapons: mustard gas attacks the skin, eyes and mucous membranes, bringing blisters, blindness and choking, and suffering could last for weeks. Opinions split from the start. Churchill praised its brilliant genius and painful significance; E. M. Forster found it too heroic, and Virginia Woolf attacked its patriotism.

Legacy

Finished in Sargent's Fulham studio in March 1919, Gassed was voted picture of the year at the Royal Academy that summer. It now belongs to the Imperial War Museum in London, with charcoal studies for it. For decades its sickly greenish-yellow tone was read as a deliberate evocation of poison. A major restoration in 2023 showed that yellowed varnish from the 1970s was to blame. Under it were Sargent's real pinks, mauves and greens, a rosy sunset and a sunlit football match, perhaps a more hopeful vision of life going on after the horror.