Arthur Streeton

The Art of War

Exhibition
15 Dec 2017 – 29 Apr 2018
Impressionist landscape looking out over a river with men bathing on the far bank

Arthur Streeton, Troops bathing, Glisy, 1918, oil on canvas. Private collection

About

Bringing together key works from collections around Australia and overseas, an important survey exhibition of Arthur Streeton’s war art will open at the NGA in December. Streeton’s contribution to the Australian war effort was significant. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps at the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth from 1915 to 1917 before leaving for the Western Front as an official war artist in May 1918.

His wartime output includes images of war machinery stranded in the landscape and scenes of operations headquarters, dressing stations and field hospitals. Streeton visited regions in France where the Australian army had been successful against the enemy, including Poulainville, Péronne and Mont St Quentin, overlooking the Somme. The NGA has recently acquired a deftly painted watercolour of this strategically significant area, presented as a gift to Sir John Monash, one of the war’s outstanding commanders.

Text sourced from: Gray, Anne, et al. Arthur Streeton : The Art of War. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2017.

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