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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
paintings, which they planned to house permanently in a custom-built memo¬
rial in Ottawa. In 1919 these were displayed in a series of exhibitions in the
United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, where they drew very large,
and for the most part admiring, crowds; the income from them enabled most
of the costs of what was a private undertaking to be recovered. But the very
title of the Canadian War Records initiative indicates an important concern of
those behind this later initiative, and to ensure as complete a record as pos¬
sible, in good bureaucrat fashion they also collected the artists’ sketches and
preliminary versions of the finished works.’ Thanks to this, we have a much
clearer idea of the artists’ creative processes, and it comes as no surprise to
learn that the final versions of the works often differ considerably from the
original scenes and incidents. Details have been added or eliminated, perspec¬
tives shifted, two or more sketches combined, and so on. In other words, the
artists were drawing on their own experience and creative instincts to produce
works that reflected the styles that they had been working in, that they con¬
tinued to develop or that they acquired by the sheer force of circumstances,
styles that enabled them to convey the emotional force of what they were wit¬
nessing. In this, they went through a process of development and change that
was similar to that of the First World War artists, for whom their time in the
Canadian War Memorials Fund programme had also been a steep learning
curve. As Jackson had explained, “The old type of factual painting had been
superseded by good photography” (Jackson 48), forcing the artists to find new
ways of capturing their subjects on canvas, and the new realities of World War
II shaped the artists in a similar fashion.
If the artists shared a similar need to take account of the omnipresence of
the new military technology in their landscapes, when it came to the ways in
which they did so — that is, the styles they employed in treating their subject
matter — there was great variety. Of course, many still worked in an essentially
realistic fashion, tempered by what was by then the Canadian landscape
norm. But a number of artists in the whole body of their work, or at least in
the most interesting pieces they created, showed very clearly the influence of
new styles. For example, many of Lawrence P. Harris’s paintings are structured
around a seemingly random juxtaposition of simplified forms — see, for exam¬
ple, his Battleground Near Ortona, with its pale dead horse in the foreground,
billowing cloud of dark smoke at the back, a tank and some mechanical debris
in between, and poking in from the left a few palm fronds. This, and many
other paintings like it, clearly derive from an interest in Surrealism. Or Miller
Brittain’s Night Target, Germany, a pattern of colours and shapes that does
5 This despite the passage in the Operational Instructions stating that “Cartoons and sketches”
were only useful “for the re-creation of atmosphere, topography, and details of arms, vehicles,
equipment, clothing, participants and terrain, of aircraft and ships” (“Dispatches”).
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