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WORLD WAR II AND CANADIAN LANDSCAPES
the Canadian army through its liberation of the Netherlands in 1944-45: Tom
Wood spent long hours on Canadian corvettes and frigates on the North At¬
lantic;? Orville Fisher was the only Allied war artist to take part in the D-Day
invasion of Normandy. There was no need for embedding in the case of Miller
Brittain, who was named an official war artist as late as 1945 but had already
experienced almost three years of active service in the RAF as a bomb aimer,
completing 37 operational sorties and being awarded the Distinguished Flying
Cross.
All these artists’ experiences gave their work an immediacy and an authen¬
ticity that surpassed that of most works from World War I. It also affected the
kinds of landscapes they created, both in subject matter and style. As Canada’s
leading authority on war art, Laura Brandon, writes,
[flor the most part, the artists were not well prepared for this new subject matter;
the landscape tradition, in which they had largely been trained, had equipped them
poorly for the reality of war. Accuracy was paramount, and the degree to which
the artists saw this as important can be seen in their thousands of detailed small
sketches of equipment, vehicles, and uniforms (“Dispatches”).
Given that so many of the artists had been trained in the landscape tradition,
they naturally gravitated to it in their work, but at the same time, in line with
both their instructions and the reality of the war, they brought in the world of
objects, above all the new weapons of war. The landscapes from both wars bear
witness to massive devastation, but the sense of stillness and emptiness so
typical of the works from World War I is largely absent in those from the later
war. Instead, there is an abundance of objects, and a narrative drive. If World
War I could be characterized as a war still dominated by humans, World War
II was very much a war in which machines were given equal time, and the
artists’ landscapes are littered with jeeps and tanks and planes, in action and
at rest, being manufactured and serviced and destroyed, or just dug into the
ground as shattered hulks. The theatre of war depicted in their paintings has
avery different appearance from that presented in the works from World War
I. This is a world on the move.’
One other major difference between the actual collections from the two
world wars is their composition. The World War I collection includes relatively
few preliminary materials: the organizers’ main concern was the final, finished
3 Though the five and a half years when endless convoys made their dangerous crossings across
the Atlantic is referred to officially as the Battle of the Atlantic, Wood modestly claimed that
most of the time things were just “boring” (Canvas of War).
4 It should be noted in passing that the ability to create a sense of movement and mobility was
something that many war artists had to learn, as this was not part of their skill set as landscape
painters: trees and lakes and hills do not move.
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