page_title: Military art
section_title: Wartime
hierarchical_section_title: Military art / Scope / Wartime
caption_attribution_description: English: Bastien has depicted a group of gunners struggling to release one of their guns from the mud. The focus on the gun, rather than on the soldiers, underlines the importance of this weapon to success on the battlefield. The terrible shelling and constant rain reduced the Passchendaele battlefield to a sea of mud. Here, a group of artillery soldiers struggle to free a mired wagon.
context_page_description: Military art is art with a military subject matter, regardless of its style or medium. The battle scene is one of the oldest types of art in developed civilizations, as rulers have always been keen to celebrate their victories and intimidate potential opponents. The depiction of other aspects of warfare, especially the suffering of casualties and civilians, has taken much longer to develop. As well as portraits of military figures, depictions of anonymous soldiers away from the battlefield have been very common; since the introduction of military uniforms such works often concentrate on showing the variety of these.
  Naval scenes are very common, and battle scenes and "ship portraits" are mostly considered as a branch of marine art; the development of other large types of military equipment such as warplanes and tanks has led to new types of work portraying these, either in action or at rest. In 20th century wars official war artists were retained to depict the military in action; despite artists now being very close to the action the battle scene is mostly left to popular graphic media and the cinema.
caption: Canadian Gunners in the Mud, Passchendaele by Lieutenant Alfred Bastien, 1917, oil on canvas. Bastien depicts a group of gunners struggling to release one of their guns from the mud. The focus on the gun, rather than on the soldiers, underlines the importance of this weapon to success on the battlefield. -- Canadian War Museum
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