The story
Across one wall at IWM London runs a canvas more than six metres long. John Singer Sargent, the American society portraitist, painted Gassed in 1919 from a scene he had witnessed in France the summer before, soldiers blinded by mustard gas being led in a line towards a dressing station. It was commissioned for a planned Hall of Remembrance that was never built, and the pictures meant for it came to the museum instead.
That says a lot about the place. It is primarily a museum of modern war, founded in 1917 while the First World War was still being fought, opened at the Crystal Palace in 1920, and moved in 1936 to Lambeth Road, into the central block of the former Bethlem Royal Hospital, the asylum Londoners called Bedlam. It is also home to one of Britain's great collections of art by official war artists.
William Orpen, the Irish-born painter who followed the army, is here with The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in June 1919, and with To the Unknown British Soldier in France. When first shown in 1923, that picture had two ghostly soldiers and cherubs beside the coffin. Orpen painted them out before giving it to the museum in 1928, and their faint outlines still show through. C. R. W. Nevinson's Paths of Glory, two dead soldiers lying in the mud, was banned by the official censor in 1917. From the Second World War there is Laura Knight's Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring, a young factory worker at her lathe in 1943.
