Sir William Orpen’s To the Unknown British Soldier in France: a controversial commemoration

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers Sir William Orpen’s controversial painting To the Unknown British Soldier in France as a site of memory in the decade following the armistice. War art played a part for many people in helping to make sense of and commemorate the war, but expectations of how art could and should do this varied between different groups and changed over time. In the later war years and immediately postwar, art produced by eyewitnesses to the conflict was valued for the truth of its testimony; however, there were different interpretations of what this meant in practice. While the Imperial War Museum sought to create a factual record of events, the majority of the public and press expected war art to tell a symbolic rather than literal truth. To the Unknown British Soldier in France was commissioned by the IWM in 1919 to commemorate the Versailles peace conference and was most expensive art commission of the war. Unveiled to a storm of controversy in 1923, it was rejected by the museum and subsequently altered by Orpen before its eventual acceptance in 1928. Orpen turned the commission into his personal commemoration of the ordinary soldier, whom he felt had been forgotten in the peace process. The painting juxtaposed spectral, decaying soldiers with a realistic, flag-draped coffin, and while this hybrid style offended some, many others warmly approved, believing that it was important to acknowledge the horrors of war even within a memorial context. This episode suggests that in the immediate postwar years, the genres of avant-garde/critical and traditional/memorial art were not mutually exclusive, and that many people wanted to honour the memory of the fallen, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the harsh realities of war.