'Art of a Second Order': the First World War from the British Home Front Perspective

‘ART OF A SECOND ORDER’ The First World War From The British Home Front Perspective by RICHENDA M. ROBERTS A Thesis Submitted to The University of Birmingham For The Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Art History, Film and Visual Studies School of Languages, Art History and Music College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham September 2012 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Little art-historical scholarship has been dedicated to fine art responding to the British home front during the First World War. Within pre-war British society concepts of sexual difference functioned to promote masculine authority. Nevertheless in Britain during wartime enlarged female employment alongside the presence of injured servicemen suggested feminine authority and masculine weakness, thereby temporarily destabilizing pre-war values. Adopting a socio-historical perspective, this thesis argues that artworks engaging with the home front have been largely excluded from art history because of partiality shown towards masculine authority within the matrices of British society. Furthermore, this situation has been supported by the writing of art history, which has, arguably, followed similar premise. This study will demonstrate that engagement with the home front inevitably meant that artists’ work could be interpreted as supporting different values to the pre-war period. However, the reintegration of ex- servicemen after the war resulted in the promotion of the wartime ordeal of male combatants. Not only did this restore the pre-war position of men, it inspired canonical values for British First World War art to uphold masculine authority. Consequently much art engaging with the home front has been deemed antithetical to established canonical values and written-out of art history. Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my two supervisors, Dr Francesca Berry and Dr Jutta Vinzent, for their invaluable support, guidance and unfailing encouragement. I am also grateful to the other members of the academic and administrative staff, both past and present, from the History of Art Department at the University of Birmingham: Dr Richard Clay, Dr Elizabeth L’Estrange, David Hemsoll, Dr Kate Ince, Tara Mann, Professor Matthew Rampley, Dr Camilla Smith and Dr Paul Spencer-Longhurst. My thanks are due to a number of individuals for their help and support: Clare Longworth and all the staff and volunteers at the De Morgan Centre, Jane Colbourne and Dr Ysanne Holt from the University of Northumbria, Andrew Potter from the Royal Academy of Arts, Duncan Walker from the Russell Cotes Art Gallery, Christopher Colyer, Guy Dollman and Walter Dollman (all descendants of John Charles Dollman), Ethel Abbott, Thomas Abbott, Dr John Bourne, David Brangwyn, Chezzy Brownen, Leonie Burke, David Cohen, Dr Tricia Cusack, Dr Lois Drawmer, Mark Guest, Martin Killeen, Paul Liss, Dr Sue Malvern, Professor Kenneth McConkey, Aileen Naylor, Victoria Osborne, Richard Pankhurst, Geoffrey Roberts, Patricia Roberts, Phyllis Roberts, William Roberts, Dr Michael Snape, Professor Ann Sumner, Dr Michael Walsh, Toby Watley, Robert Wenley, Professor Shearer West and Janet Wheeler. I additionally wish to thank my fellow PhD students for their friendship: Joanne Anderson, Dr John Blythe, Nicola Capon, Rebecca Gill, Charlotte Gore and Elaine Williams. Moreover, I want to thank the staff of many museums, archives and libraries for their assistance, especially the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Cambridge University Main Library. Additionally, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum, the National Art Library, the Royal Academy of Arts Archive, Tate Gallery Archive and the Women’s Library (all in London). I am also most grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council without whose financial support for a full scholarship this project would have been much harder to undertake. Finally, in 1968, shortly before his death, my great grandfather William Henry Roberts gave my mother two items: his wife’s diamond engagement ring and a collection of postcards depicting images of the war-torn Flanders landscape during the First World War, where he had served as a serviceman. Handing the items to my mother Will-Henry informed her that ‘these are for the maid.’ The ‘maid’ referred to was me, at the time a small child. Forty years later in April 2008, after I had begun research for this thesis, I was told the aforementioned story. I was immediately struck with awe at the poignant significance of the postcards as a gift to me all those years earlier. I subsequently searched and found the postcards in my grandparents’ attic. My great grandfather was not a wealthy man and my great grandmother’s diamond ring, which I still cherish today, was perhaps the most valuable item he possessed. The fact that, along with the ring, I had been bequeathed postcards showing the effects of the First World War signified to me the importance of such items as mementos of the conflict to my great grandfather and perhaps most, if not all, of his generation. This demonstrated to me the profundity of the impact of war upon human society. Therefore, lest we should ever forget, this thesis is ultimately dedicated to anyone whose life is or has been touched by war. Contents Page Introduction 1 Review of Previous Art-historical Scholarship 9 The Effects of the Juncture of War and Sexual Difference During the First World War 20 Methodological Approach 25 Scope of Thesis, Archives and Resources 29 Thesis Structure 36 Chapter One Establishing the Link: ‘The Reciprocal Metaphorization’ of War and Sexual Difference at the Beginning of the First World War. 43 1.1 Pre-war Constructions of Sexual Difference in Early Twentieth-Century Britain 1.1.1 Masculinity 58 1.1.2 Femininity 65 1.2 Reiterating Past Practice: The Legacy of Traditional Values and Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity at the Start of the First World War 1.2.1 The Role of Chivalry in the Promotion of Male Enlistment for War 69 1.2.2 Women as Symbols of Peace 82 Page Chapter Two Destabilizing the ‘Tropic Balance:’ The Effect of Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Paintings Engaging with Wartime Life on the British Home Front. 112 2.1 Challenging Binary Tradition: Injured Men 126 2.2 How the Signification of Masculine Sacrifice in Paintings Functioned to Help Enforce a Gender-based Divide in Wartime Experience 143 2.3 Engendering the Construction of Ambiguous Concepts of Femininity: The Use of Female Figures in Paintings Engaging with the Home Front Perspective 156 Chapter Three Concepts of Sexual Difference and the Construction of Death and Bereavement in Paintings Responding to the Home Front Perspective. 186 3.1 Absent Men and Women as Chief Mourners 198 3.2 The Umbilical Link: Servicemen, Mothers and Motherhood 205 3.3 The Linking of Sexual Difference and Spiritualism in Attempts to Go Beyond Death 228 Conclusion 269 Bibliography 285 List of Illustrations 305 Illustrations 311 Introduction In December 1929 the Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, received the extant version of Youth Mourning (c.1928, Fig. 1) by Sir George Clausen (1852-1944).1 Featuring a bent-double, nude, female figure and a single cross located within a landscape of water-filled trenches, Clausen’s painting can be understood to symbolize the experience of the First World War (1914-18) from the perspectives of both combatants on the battle front and civilians on the home front.2 In Youth Mourning (Fig. 1), signalling the sacrificial nature of the war, the single cross, located within the landscape of flooded trenches, operates as a sign for the bodies of servicemen killed or deemed missing in action on the Western Front battlefields. On this basis Clausen’s painting suggests the selfless, yet piteous, heroism of men whose experiences of war comprised mainly of facing both ever increasing industrialized weaponry and hostile weather conditions. Meanwhile the incongruous placing of the nude female figure, bent-double as if seized with pain into a position similar to that assumed by a foetus in its mother’s womb, has a dual function. On one hand, the absurd location of the figure can be understood to signal the senseless loss of men who had died fighting valiantly to protect the British nation and loved ones on the home front, such as wives and children. These 1 The IWM was founded in March 1917 with the intention of collecting and displaying material as a record of all aspects of war and other military operations involving Britain and its Empire since 1914. Suzanne Bardgett (ed.), Imperial War Museum Review, London, No. 8,1993, 107. The painting was given to the IWM by its owner, who was called Luxmoore. Kenneth McConkey has noted that in 1928 all but one of the crosses in the original version of Youth Mourning (Fig. 61) of 1916 were removed. According to McConkey the reason for this change ‘remains unexplained,’ but he has speculated that the re-working of the painting was done at the request of the painting’s owner, perhaps to make the work more acceptable to the IWM. Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen, R.A. 1852-1944, exhibition catalogue (Bradford, London, Bristol and Newcastle), Bradford and Newcastle, 1980, 91.

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