The Road

In 1918 the British government sent Sargent to the Western Front to find a subject for a huge picture of British and American troops working together. Around Arras he kept seeing the same thing, a road jammed with men and machines, and back in England he tried it out in this sketch. Trucks, tanks and fresh troops come straight toward us on the left, while the wounded walk away on the right. Further back, officers on horseback ride behind a soldier on a motorcycle, the old army and the new sharing one lane. Sargent thought the road could carry a big composition if, as he put it, it could be prevented from looking like going to the Derby, the crowded English horse race. In the end he dropped it and painted a line of soldiers blinded by gas instead. The museum bought this sketch from him in 1919 for $1,000.