Since it was unveiled just months after the end of the first world war, John Singer Sargent’s monumental painting Gassed has been hailed as an era-defining artwork, going on to be the most popular in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.
Enormous in scale – it is more than 6 metres wide – the painting depicts lines of soldiers, blinded by mustard gas, picking their way through a crowded battlefield, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front. In later decades many viewers have admired Sargent’s uncharacteristic use of a greenish-yellow colour scheme, emphasising the flat khaki of the soldiers’ uniforms and perhaps even a queasy atmosphere tinged with poison gas, in which two men lean over to vomit.
Now, a major new restoration of the painting has revealed that that was not the painter’s intention at all. After removing what they discovered to be a thick layer of 1970s varnish, conservators have revealed a dramatically different artwork, which they say “glows” with pinks, mauves and greens reminiscent of the impressionists, and which they believe the artist may have intended to be a more hopeful vision of the aftermath of war.
“Until recently, everyone thought it was a yellow painting, and I think that has affected the way we viewed it,” said Rebecca Newell, the museum’s head of art. “But now we know that was just the varnish.”
Stripping it away has highlighted not only the rosy sky at sunset and hovering moon, but the fine details of a football match illuminated in bright sunlight in the background. “So it may actually be much more of a pointed attempt to say something about the routine ubiquity of gas by this point, and the fact that life goes on, even though there is immense suffering,” said Newell.
The painting is the arresting centrepiece of a new suite of galleries at the south London museum, which it says are the first in the UK to be dedicated to art, film and photographic responses to war. Gassed will hang alongside a work by the modernist painter Stanley Spencer that was commissioned at the same time, and also next to photographs by David Cotterrell of gravely injured soldiers being flown home from Afghanistan in 2009.
Sargent was 62 and an extremely successful (and wealthy) society portraitist when he was approached towards the end of the war to create an imposing artwork for a proposed new hall of remembrance. He initially resisted – it took a personal letter from the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to persuade him – but threw himself into the task with enthusiasm in the summer of 1918, travelling to France and Belgium while the conflict was still continuing.
The lines of soldiers depicted in Gassed were based on real scenes witnessed by the artist in late August of that year. He completed the painting after returning to London, and just eight months later it was included in the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, where it was an immediate hit with audiences and won painting of the year (although one visitor, Virginia Woolf, was unimpressed).
Though the proposed hall of remembrance was never built, it has been on almost permanent display at the museum ever since – and because of its enormous scale, has only very rarely been lent elsewhere.
Phil Young, the conservator who painstakingly cleaned and restored the canvas over the course of a year, said the extent of its transformation had far exceeded his expectations. “I think it foxed everybody, because it had several layers [of varnish] and it was very dead and matte. Lots of conservators had looked at it and none of us really picked up on this fact until I started cleaning it and realised there was this yellow that went over everything.
“It’s been relieved of its issues now. And for me, a painting on this scale, I would hope you get the general effect when you first see it – because it glows.”
Gassed will go on display in the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries, opening at IWM London on 10 November. A new book by Rebecca Newell about the artwork and its restoration is available from IWM.
