War Artists' Advisory Committee

I think the most formative thing about that period, I mean, there are so many things, but if she's talking about someone's sort of teens and twenties book, a real sort of strong line was, and if we think about how different it is to have someone getting to that point in their life would experience trying to start life as an artist or painter now.

It was just immediately after the Second World War and there was a sense in the country and more broadly of... kind of state funding for the arts and there being that sort of you know despite living in an entirely sort of shattered continental world that was kind of massively indebted in all sorts of ways that there were you know there was a newly founded arts council alongside you know an NHS and a but also kind of nuclear weapons research campaign but the sense that John started life well he was an art student and then he was called at the military service and then he was did his short period of military service and then became an art student again and that was funded with an ex-serviceman's grant so he had it wasn't an enormous amount of money but he could start out like that and then when he started making money separate to that it was on the bbc the sort of predecessor of the bbc world service um and so that was also another state funded thing and he was this was the time of the um the festival of britain and so the sense of what uh art being produced on behalf of uh in a kind of democratic way on behalf of the people and the idea that the patron of the future was uh was the state or was that the people who had voted who had voted for that government um was i think struck him particularly powerfully because he around this time he met a uh a hungarian jewish um emigre called uh frederick antole who in some ways becomes the subject of his first book his first novel sorry um who who um wrote about uh the renaissance and about how patronage worked in say renaissance florence no he wasn't you know sort of uh early modern florence and how their artists had been considered um kind of craft people who worked to a commission and their sort of individual hand was in how they served that commission that He, John, sort of would have first seen in these paintings when they came one by one as part of the National Gallery, as part of the Picture of the Month thing during the war, alongside works made by the War Artists Advisory Committee.

So suddenly the sense that people were making work to commission again rather than as an art for art, in the sense of art for art's sake or their personal kind of whims.

So I think that was probably the most formative thing.

Can you imagine that? And he continued that role into the Second World War as well.

when he was part of the War Artists Advisory Committee and actually producing paintings of aerial warfare.

But I think when he was creating this particular woodcut in 1924, so six years after the First World War had ended, he might have been thinking about this subject, light.

Is it possible again to have some light at the horizon? That's a really profound