painting, STONE CRUSHER AT STEPPER POINT

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Object Number 19710261-2297
Event 1939-1945 Second World War
Great Britain
Affiliation --
Artist / Maker / Manufacturer Comfort , O.C., C.D., LL.D., R, Major Charles Fraser
Date Made 1943/07/30

Category Communication artifacts
Sub-category Art
Department Art and Memorials
Museum CWM
Earliest 1943/07/30
Latest 1943/07/30
Medium watercolour
Support paper
mat
Materials Not applicable
Branch Royal Canadian Engineers
Service Component Canadian Army
Unit 2nd Battalion
Measurements Height 36.8 cm, Width 54.2 cm

Caption Charles Comfort (1900 - 1994)
Additional Information Comfort's war began in October 1939 when he became a rifle instructor with the Canadian Officers' Training Corps. In February 1943 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Canadian Active Service Force to serve as an official war artist. He had supported the idea of a war art program from the beginning in the full knowledge that Canada had successfully pioneered such a scheme during the First World War. In England Comfort depicted the Corps of the Royal Canadian Engineers and the 16th Battery, Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. In Italy he joined the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, painting principally the Ortona and Liri Valley battles. The artist later published his war diaries in a volume entitled Artist at War (1956). From 1960 to 1965 Comfort served as director of the National Gallery of Canada. While the National Gallery had had custody of the War Art Collections since 1946, it was only under Comfort that a Curator of War Art was appointed. During that time Comfort's commitment to war art showed itself in the funds made available for the proper storage and care of the collections and in the many important acquisitions in which he was personally involved. Some of the most popular Canadian paintings of the Second World War are Comfort's work. These include The Hitler Line, a dramatic subject based on the artist's experiences in the Italian campaign, which hangs permanently in the Canadian War Museum. Comfort's careful reconstruction of the events of the ill-fated Dieppe Raid is another well-known composition. It is in the many watercolour sketches completed near the field of battle, however, that we see the artist's response to war. The Italian landscape dazzled him, and many of his lyrical sketches pay homage to this civilized land torn apart by conflict. Because Comfort was always striving for accuracy in depicting the men and machinery of war, frustration sometimes emerged. Then, his brush exploded over the paper as a series of paintings all titled Battle Scene (Fantasy). These works convey the artist's awareness of the fragility of human life in wartime and his anger at the senseless destruction he witnessed. Comfort could be inspired by a particularly stirring scene, as his painting Spitfires Flying Low over Raviscanina shows. In this watercolour the felled tree trunk acts as a counterpoint to the pair of speeding aircraft above. The landscape is forced into the background in the face of the urgency of war.