International studio (60.1916/1917)

British Artists in the I Bar Zone

has been rather the chance by which Mr. Bone’s
art has profited, and the result is most interesting
and successful. It certainly has supplied him
with a very great number of motives. For his
drawings include not only views of ruins, or battle-
fields, but every phase of subjects and incidents
that have been, and are, taking place on the Western
War frontier, viz. military operations, hospital
scenes, camp and trench life. Looking through the
many drawings, one can trace his travels from the
moment of his arrival in France, when he notes
down his first impression of the evidences of War
in the shape of a delicate drawing, admirable in
line and design (here reproduced) of The British
Red Cross Depot at Boulogne, to the impressive
drawing called Watching British Artillery Fire on
Trones Wood. This latter drawing shows the
extraordinary power and vitality of Mr. Bone’s
work. From the reproduction one can realise the
scene with its view across the vast plain stretching
to the windy sky and rapidly drifting smoke from
the distant guns. How simply yet powerfully
expressed is the foreground scarred with shell-
holes, where there is never the touch of a line
or a wash too much. The same thing applies
equally to the marvellous drawing British Troops

on the March to the Somme. Could the play
of light and shadow over an undulating land-
scape be given more truthfully or sensitively ?
The susceptible touch of the chalk line and wash
give rhythm, form, and atmospheric effect to the
whole most perfectly. The figures not only com-
pletely express movement (look at the group of
galloping horsemen in mid-distance), but the long
sweeping line of the far-off troops also emphasises
the dip of the valley, and this line is repeated
in the foreground figures, and the eye wanders
interested from point to point.
Outside Arras (near the German lines) from the
reproduction does not look a very interesting
subject, but the artist has made it so. A beautiful
drawing called The Country near Amiens too has
no subject but is full of the power that Rembrandt
or Ruisdael possessed of expressing vast distances
and atmospheric effects. Mr. Bone’s drawing is
one that tells of a country of flat plains spreading
endlessly. In fact the whole series of landscapes
in this campaign, especially those interminable
straight French roads, in the artist’s hands, offer
themselves as a modern wandering place for the
mind, so vividly are they expressed. A drawing
of a road along which a transport is moving with


“outside arras (near the german lines)” (From “ The Western Front”) drawing by muirhead bone
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