Glow of Victory

It is characteristic of great art to reinvent itself for changing times, and restorers' work on John Singer Sargent's Gassed has enabled just such a modernising transmogrification. Commissioned shortly after the First World War for display in a hall of remembrance (which duly took its rightful place in the country fit for heroes to live in by never being built), Sargent's piece was noted for a greenish-yellow sheen which was taken to be an unwontedly realistic atmospheric detail. The restoration has revealed that this aspect was in fact an accidental product of later varnishing, and that Sargent's original work was in keeping both with the interests of his Government employers and with his own characteristic style, provoking criticism from Virginia Woolf and E M Forster and a predictable gush of rah-rah from the Secretary of State for Hot Air, Winston Churchill. Although Gassed depicts blinded soldiers struggling across a battlefield, the colour scheme "glows" with the plucky little vision of a better world, and suggests that although there may be suffering among the expendables, for the Government and its wealthier servants life still goes on.