ABSTRACT

On 12 December 1919, The Nation’s War Paintings and Other Records opened at the Royal Academy in London. Passing through the various rooms of the Academy’s home in Burlington House that day visitors may have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of an exhibition that comprised over 920 pictures drawn from the collection of the Imperial War Museum (IWM). 1 Of these works, just over 90 depicted locations or individuals connected with the hostilities in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Arabia and Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). When this figure is further broken down, a mere 15 pictures – 14 of which were relatively small-scale watercolour studies – imagined the ‘neglected war’ that had been fought in Mesopotamia, 2 where, in the view of an airman who served there, ‘forgotten British officers [died] in nameless fights or rott[ed] with fever in distant outposts, unknown, uncared-for, and unsung.’ 3 At the Royal Academy in 1919 the Mesopotamian campaign may have seemed to the exhibition’s visitors, visually, also unsung.