General Officers of World War I

Right after the First World War, a South African mining millionaire named Abraham Bailey paid to have Britain's victorious commanders painted for the nation, and Sargent, who had built his fame on flattering society portraits, did not want the job. You can almost feel his reluctance in the result. The 22 generals in identical khaki stand shoulder to shoulder in front of a plain brown nothing, no battlefield, no map table, no glory. Sargent said he had painted them all standing up in a vacuum. He had just finished Gassed, his enormous canvas of blinded soldiers, so he knew what the war had actually cost. He gives these men their medals and their height and not one heroic prop.