page_title: Gassed (painting)
section_title: Completion
hierarchical_section_title: Gassed (painting) / Completion
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Питер Брейгель Старший Притча о слепых Дерево, масло. 1568
context_page_description: Gassed is a very large oil painting completed in March 1919 by John Singer Sargent. It depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War, with a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station. Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war and visited the Western Front in July 1918 spending time with the Guards Division near Arras, and then with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres. The painting was finished in March 1919 and voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. It is now held by the Imperial War Museum. It visited the US in 1999 for a series of retrospective exhibitions, and then from 2016 to 2018 for exhibitions commemorating the centenary of the First World War.
context_section_description: The painting was completed in March 1919, and Sargent was paid his £600 fee. It was first displayed at the Royal Academy in London in 1919. It was voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. The painting was not universally liked: E. M. Forster considered it too heroic. Winston Churchill praised its "brilliant genius and painful significance", but Virginia Woolf attacked its patriotism. It is now held by the Imperial War Museum, along with several charcoal studies for the painting. Other charcoal sketches are held by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. A small 10½ x 27¼ in. (26 x 69 cm) oil sketch, originally owned by Evan Charteris, was sold by Christie's in 2003 for £162,050 ($267,869).
  The painting provides a powerful testimony of the effects of chemical weapons, vividly described in Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est. Mustard gas is a persistent vesicant gas, with effects that only become apparent several hours after exposure. It attacks the skin, the eyes and the mucous membranes, causing large skin blisters, blindness, choking and vomiting. Death, although rare, can occur within two days, but suffering may be prolonged over several weeks.
  Sargent's painting refers to Bruegel's 1568 work The Parable of the Blind, with the blind leading the blind, and it also alludes to Rodin's Burghers of Calais.
caption: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Parable of the Blind, 1568. The painting is referenced by Sargent's.
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