Henry Tonks (1862-1937) [Aw295]
RUINED INTERIOR, ARRAS, 1918
Watercolour over pencil; signed, inscribed and dated lower right: Henry Tonks / Arras France 1918 (H. 24 cm, W. 48 cm)
A woman stands in a room. Around her a scene of devastation: broken chairs; windows without glass; bricks without plaster; a ceiling collapsed; and a gas lamp hanging drunkenly. Everything about the woman conveys a sense of shock: she seems numbed by the wreckage of what is – presumably – her home. Stark is the contrast between the delicacy of Tonks’ watercolour washes and the damage they describe.
Henry Tonks trained as a surgeon before changing career at the age of thirty-one and joining the staff of the Slade. A brilliant – if sardonic, at times frightening – teacher to a generation of pre-war Slade artists that included Stanley Spencer, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Mark Gertler and Christopher Nevinson, in his painting and drawings Tonks retained a surgeon’s eye for detail.
Tonks painted this work on leaving the Guards Division to which he had been attached together with John Singer Sargent in the summer of 1918. Appalled by the destruction he had witnessed (he hoped ‘that soon we will be in a position to fine them 10 million a day for every day they do not surrender unconditionally’), his anger at the waste of the war is subsumed in his factual recording of the effect of artillery shelling on this anonymous Frenchwoman’s home.
Literature: Joseph Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (London, 1939), p. 144.
Provenance: Gift of Harry Collison, 1940.