Anthony Gross (1905-1984) was not so much interested in the glamorous end of war, which is probably just as well, because glamour tends to be in rather short supply in a medical facility, known as the advanced dressing station. His 1942 watercolour ‘The Battle of Egypt – Advanced Dressing Station Interior’ shows men waiting, resting and enduring, with one figure seated in the middle of the picture while others lie around him in a scene of fatigue and exhaustion rather than triumph. These are the human consequences of war, just a waiting room of pain and I’m still not sure that I can really comprehend how frightening this whole process must have been.
In early life Gross lived in Dulwich and Camberwell, apprenticed at the LCC School of Photo Engraving and Lithography, then studied at the Slade and in Paris, which gave him a rather serious artistic grounding before the Second World War arranged more urgent subject matter for him. The information panel at the museum notes that he was one of four official war artists commissioned to record the Middle East theatre of war, in this case focusing on the people patching up the wounded in conditions that look deeply sub-optimal, while everyone tries not to think too hard about what comes next.
And, something which interested me more than it probably should have done, but it was Anthony Gross who created the artwork for the first edition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.