With the art of war and those artworks produced by the official war artists during the years of 1914-18,

we have a unique insight into the battlefields as they were more than a century ago

and a connection to the landscape that we know today.

Happy New Year and welcome to Season 5 of the Old Frontline podcast.

We're starting this season with a podcast on the art of war, war art in the Great War, in the First World War,

something a little bit different. And it's going to need you to look at the podcast website

for this, because the artworks that we're going to be speaking about are going to be displayed

there for you to see as we discuss them. So why war art and what is my

interest in the art of the First World War? Well I think when you study a period in great depth and

it's 40 years now, more than 40 years since I first went to the battlefields of the Western Front,

you look at it from a lot of different levels,

from the literature, from the memoirs, from the poetry, from the photographs, of course,

with this vast archive of official photographs and having collected private images myself for many years,

that gives you another insight into it as well but i remember from

my very earliest visits to the imperial war museum with my dad going right back to the 1970s being struck

by the artwork that was on display there much of it it now incorporated into the galleries, but in those

days, as there still is now, a separate gallery of artwork from both major conflicts of the 20th century.

But some of those enormous pieces of artwork, physically massive paintings, really left a lasting impression on me.

And when I began to visit the Western Front and the battlefields of the Great War

and look at the landscape, try to interpret that landscape myself through photography,

then looking at artwork was an extension of that, was part of the research for that,

because many of the artists in the Great War looked at that landscape themselves

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