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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS Fund had been clear: to create a body of paintings that would celebrate the contribution of Canada and Canadians to an Allied victory. Portraits of leading military figures were not a problem - the artists were simply assigned sitters — but when it came to depicting the Western Front, how the painters would go about this was usually left up to them: they were to make sketches ofwhat they saw, and then back in England or Canada to create finished paintings based on the sketches. But the Canadian War Records initiative in the Second World War was much more organized and, not surprisingly as it was run by a government department, more bureaucratic. The artists were given “Operational Instructions,” instructing them to “prepare a plan to cover the activity you are going to record, with a time-table covering a week in advance” as well as possible steps in forming such a plan. Individual sections of the instructions gave details on what they were to do once they were actually in situ and working — for example, “After field sketches and notes have been completed, lose no time in securing additional details of topography, uniform, equipment, weapons and vehicles portrayed; and arrange for participants to pose as models” (“Canada’s War Artists’ Perspectives”). The same was true of subject matter: they should portray “significant events, scenes, phases and episodes in the experience of the Canadian Armed Forces”. The stated “intention” was that “your productions shall be worthy of Canada’s highest cultural traditions, doing justice to History, and as works of art, worthy of exhibition anywhere at any time” (“Doing Justice to History”). A lot of things for an artist to keep in mind when creating, many of them difficult to reconcile with each other. The artists in the World War II programme were closer to the reality of war than those in the First World War. In the Great War, only A.Y. Jackson had seen action while serving in the ranks. Most of the other artists were kept far from the front lines, or only appeared on the battlefields long after actual fighting was over, where the only evidence of war they saw was the devasted countryside and ruined buildings. David Milne in fact arrived after the war was over — as he later wrote, he was unable to tell whether he was “the last soldier or the first tourist” (Silcox 114). The policy in World War II was to bring the artists as close to the men and women serving as possible: they should share in the experience of “active operations” so as to “know and understand the action, the circumstances, the environment, and the participants” (“Doing Justice to History”). In fact some of the artists were on active service in one of the three branches of the Canadian armed forces before being invited to join the programme, while most of the others were, in today’s terminology, “embedded” for shorter or longer periods in specific campaigns. For example, Will Ogilvy experienced the Sicilian Campaign in 1943 alongside a Canadian army unit; Charles Comfort and Lawren P. Harris shared the Canadian forces’ fiercely contested slog north in Italy in 1943-44; Alex Colville accompanied + 180 +
