The Great War In Portraits

The first national exhibition of the First World War centenary commemorations.

Showing how the First World War was depicted and reported with a degree of visual detail unprecedented in the history of conflict, the exhibition includes photography and film as well as formal portraits. Rather than presenting a military history of the War, the Gallery aims to focus on the way the Great War was represented through portraits of those involved, an approach never previously adopted.

The Great War in Portraits takes an international perspective. As well as iconic portraits of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Winston Churchill, the exhibition reflects the war experience of those from all social classes who served from throughout the Commonwealth and contrasts these portraits with rare important loans of major art works by Lovis Corinth and Max Beckmann and Kirchner’s painting Selbstbildnis als Soldat (Self-portrait as a Soldier). These German expressionist masterpieces are strikingly exhibited together, for the first time, with Harold Gillies’ rarely shown photographs of facially injured soldiers from the Royal College of Surgeons.