Depicting the war on canvas

During the First World War, the main images of battle were sombre black-and-white photographs showing the horror of the trenches. From 1917, the government commissioned a series of large war paintings to memorialise the sacrifices of the ANZACs in a more permanent form. Charles Bean, the Australian war correspondent and historian, wanted the paintings to be "moving panoramas of heroism and suffering" to inspire future generations. He thought that the artists' task was "almost sacred".

George Lambert ANZAC, the landing 1915 [detail] Click on the image to view the full painting.

George Lambert was commissioned to depict the landing of Australian troops at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. As an official war artist, he travelled to Gallipoli with Charles Bean early in 1919, and inspected the site of the landing. Lambert returned to London where he made a full-size pencil drawing, basing his figures on models dressed in uniforms and posing as though climbing a steep cliff. The drawing was transferred onto canvas and shipped to Australia, where Lambert completed the painting in 1921.

Some visitors were disappointed in the completed work, complaining that there was "a lack of fire, a lack of action". Lambert responded that in fact the Australian soldiers, heavily laden and with no idea where the enemy was, would have looked just like a "swarm of ants, climbing ... painfully and laboriously upward through the uneven ground and spiky uncomfortable shrubs". The soldiers in Lambert's painting are small, faceless figures, dwarfed by the landscape, and they seem to lose their individuality in the mass. Australian troops at Gallipoli in 1915 wore round peaked caps, but Lambert depicted them wearing slouch hats, a symbol, by the end of the war, of Australian bravery.

George Lambert ANZAC, the landing 1915 [detail] Click on the image to view the full painting.

The painting went on show when the Australian War Memorial opened in Melbourne on Anzac Day 1922. A reviewer wrote that, although "there is an uncanny lack of anything individual or personal in the scrambling, crawling khaki figures", Lambert's painting "speaks as a declaration of sacrifice and achievement in a way that no other war picture has done".

The paintings produced by the official war artists helped shape the Anzac legend. Thousands of coloured reproductions were framed and hung on parlour walls. Subtly and deliberately, the experience of the Anzacs became for many a defining element in Australia's national identity.

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Glossary of Terms

Depicting the War at Home

Depicting the War on Canvas