We went to a preview of a television film that Margy Kinmonth has made with Eddie Redmayne on the impact of the first world war on art. He comes across incredibly well – knowledgeable and unself-important, with an interest in the subject based on reading art history at Cambridge. The Royal Academy appears because of the memorial outside to the Artists’ Rifle Brigade and because the female students in the RA Schools were employed to paint the dazzle camouflage on the ships employing the pictorial devices of cubism. We were so inspired by the number of pictures shown in the storerooms of the Imperial War Museum – works by Nevinson, Bomberg, Sargent and both Nashes – that we set off to see them.
We found the dazzle boats which were apparently found in a store in Duxford:-
A wonderful maquette for a war memorial in Soissons by Eric Kennington:-
And the maquette which Jagger produced for the proposed Hall of Remembrance:-
