Gassed

Gassed is a monumental painting that stands as one of the most powerful artistic responses to the horrors of chemical warfare during World War I. The canvas stretches over six meters wide, depicting eleven life-sized soldiers, their eyes wrapped in bandages after a mustard gas attack, being guided along duckboards by medical orderlies toward a dressing station. In the background, other blinded soldiers wait or lie on the ground, while a distant football match suggests the surreal normalcy that persisted alongside the carnage.

The work originated from Sargent's commission by the British War Memorials Committee to document the conflict. On August 21, 1918, near the village of Bailleulval on the Western Front, Sargent witnessed the aftermath of a German gas barrage that had blinded soldiers of the British 2nd and 3rd Infantry Divisions. The scene left a profound impression, and he completed the painting at his Fulham studio between late 1918 and March 1919.

Voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy in 1919, the work drew both praise and criticism. Winston Churchill admired its "brilliant genius and painful significance," while Virginia Woolf questioned its patriotic overtones. A 2023 conservation effort removed layers of yellowed varnish from a 1970s restoration, revealing the work's original luminous quality.