Art Analysis Of John Singer Sargent's 'Gassed'

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“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent Art Analysis
Tilly Olsson 8D

“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent was painted in August of 1918 (towards the end of World War I) , but published in 1919, according to the Imperial War Museums Organisation, which is where this painting is now located. This painting was created using oil paints on a canvas, and was 231 cm x 611 cm in size. John Singer Sargent was an American painter who was born in 1856 in Florence, Italy.
This painting has a landscape shape, as well as belonging to a historical or war genre. The angle of this painting is a pretty normal eye level, as if standing a couple meters away from the scene and looking straight and a couple degrees tilted downwards. I can tell this because you can see on the painting that Sargent has made the ground visible as well. The painting centers around injured and tired soldiers, about 11 of them standing and leaning on each other in a line. The majority of the soldiers are facing the same direction, looking to the right (from the perspective of the viewer) except for two soldiers who are looking the other way. This line of soldiers is being helped by another man who is dressed in overalls and a hat, who is obviously not apart of their group. Almost all of the soldiers we can see that are standing up have a white cloth covering their eyes. This line of soldiers are walking on what looks to be a series of wooden planks, laid down horizontally. These wooden planks are leading a path towards several ropes that are tied down to the ground around the soldiers. You can see one of the soldiers in the first line has his leg lifted as if walking up stairs, to accent the step of the wooden plank. The ropes are attached onto dark, metal connector that straps the ro...

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...he American Civil War. No matter what, the pictures of war that I’ve seen all have the same sad, hopeless, and tired expression of the soldiers that have fought that I think the painter was trying to show. This expression that has been like boulders on the shoulders of the soldiers won’t just go away, but I see it outside of the war as well; the wars of everyday life. It’s almost as if these warriors’ heavy hearts were so heavy that it physically weighed their bodies down to a shrug. I think that John Singer Sargent wasn’t sent to France to just capture the aftermath of World War I, but to capture the feeling that people have after their own wars. I think this heavy hearted and sorrow feeling that is expressed in this picture wasn’t just painted for this particular war, but to represent the wars people like us, the soldiers, fight in everyday life in our own war.

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