General Officers of World War I


General Officers of World War I is an oil painting by John Singer Sargent, completed in 1922. It was commissioned by South African financier Sir Abraham Bailey, 1st Baronet to commemorate the generals who commanded British and British Empire armies in the First World War.

Background

Sargent was initially unwilling to take on such a large project, but took the commission in January 1919 and began work in August 1920, after he completed his similarly huge painting, Gassed. He was also working on murals for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.
Sargent found it difficult to find a suitable composition for so many full-length portraits, and Sargent himself foresaw a "horrible failure". The resulting painting is unsatisfactory, with 22 men in khaki uniforms standing like pillars in a crowd in front of an anonymous brownish void, possibly an open doorway, with the bases of fluted pillars to either side. Sargent described it as "painting them all standing up in a vacuum". They look forward with blank stares, with no discernible purpose, almost as if each was unaware of the others around him.
The completed painting measures. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1922.
Bailey commissioned two other commemorative portraits, Statesmen of World War I by Sir James Guthrie, and Naval Officers of World War I by Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope. Bailey paid £5,000 for each of the three paintings and donated all three to the National Portrait Gallery.

Generals

The painting depicts 22 of the approximately 1,500 brigadier-generals, major-generals, lieutenant-generals, generals, and field marshals who served in the British and Imperial armies in the First World War. All but two of the subjects reached the rank of at least lieutenant-general, and most were commanders of armies or army corps. The only two divisional commanders are Major-General Lukin and Major-General Russell.
From left to right, they are:
  1. Field Marshal William Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood
  2. Field Marshal Jan Smuts
  3. General Louis Botha
  4. Field Marshal Julian Byng, 1st Viscount Byng of Vimy
  5. General Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baron Rawlinson
  6. Major-General Sir Henry Lukin
  7. General Sir John Monash
  8. General Henry Horne, 1st Baron Horne
  9. Field Marshal George Milne, 1st Baron Milne
  10. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, 1st Baronet
  11. Major-General Sir Andrew Hamilton Russell
  12. Field Marshal Herbert Plumer, 1st Viscount Plumer
  13. General Sir John Cowans
  14. Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig
  15. Field Marshal John French, 1st Earl of Ypres
  16. Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, 1st Baronet
  17. Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude
  18. Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby
  19. Lieutenant-General Sir William Marshall
  20. General Sir Arthur Currie
  21. Field Marshal Rudolph Lambart, 10th Earl of Cavan
  22. General Sir Charles Macpherson Dobell
The generals are mostly British, but some representatives from the British Empire are also included: Field Marshal Smuts, General Botha and Major-General Lukin from South Africa, Generals Currie and Dobell from Canada, General Monash from Australia, and Major-General Russell from New Zealand.
A list of potential subjects was compiled by Evan Charteris and Lewis Vernon Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt, and approved by Bailey. Some were deliberately omitted. Others prominent army commanders to be left out include Horace Smith-Dorrien, Hubert Gough, Charles Monro, Richard Haking, William Peyton, Charles Kavanagh, John Nixon, Percy Lake, and Charles Townshend; administrative officers such as Stanley von Donop, William Furse, Nevil Macready, George Macdonogh, Ronald Charles Maxwell and Travers Clarke, several Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff – Charles W. H. Douglas, James Wolfe Murray, and Archibald Murray – and army chiefs of staff, such as Charles "Tim" Harington, Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, Launcelot Kiggell and Herbert Lawrence. There are no officers from the Royal Flying Corps, such as Hugh Trenchard, David Henderson and John Salmond, or the Tank Corps, such as Hugh Elles.