Artist Profiles
Will Longstaff
1879-1953
Will Longstaff
Menin Gate at Midnight
AWM ART09807
Will Longstaff was born in Ballarat, Victoria
in 1879. From 1900 to 1901, he served with the South African Light Horse
in the Boer War. Following his return to Victoria, he taught art privately
with Leslie Wilkie at Eltham. He enlisted with the Remounts in October
1915 and served in the Middle East and France before being invalided to
England in October 1917. While serving in Egypt, he made pictorial records
of the ANZAC Mounted Division and the Desert
Column. He then served in England with the B Sub-Depot, Westham. In 1918,
he was trained in camouflage work in London with Frank Crozier, J. S.
MacDonald and James Scott, and he was subsequently appointed as an Official
War Artist working as officer in charge of camouflage for the 2nd Division
AIF in France.
Longstaff's Menin Gate at midnight,
painted in 1927, is one of the best-known paintings in the Australian
War Memorial's art collection. In the years following the First World
War, this painting's tribute to sacrifice, combined with its spiritualist
overtones, struck exactly the right chord with many Australians who had
lost family and friends in the war. Longstaff painted the work after he
had attended the unveiling ceremony of the Menin Gate memorial at the
entrance of the Belgian town of Ypres 24 July 1927. This memorial was
dedicated to the 350,000 men of the British and empire forces who had
died in the battles around Ypres.
Lieutenant (later Captain) W.F. Longstaff, who was
adjutant of the Australian Remount Unit from 1915 to May 1917, and was
afterwards appointed as an official artist.
AWM J01940
Longstaff used well-known motifs to trigger emotion. His scarlet poppies are flowers that could be found in the Flanders fields, but they also carry the traditional connotations of shed blood and remembrance; they represent a floral blanket covering the bloodied bodies of unknown soldiers; at the same time, like the paper poppies worn on Remembrance Day, they are a tribute from the living to the dead. The portrayal of the steel-helmeted soldiers rising from the cornfields extends the range of visual emblems used by Longstaff: the plentiful harvest; the harvest of men; the steel-helmeted crosses covering the graves of many soldiers; and the helmeted bayonets raised in cheer and victory.
