(St Gratien: General Birdwood bidding farewell to headquarters staff)

Depicts staff of the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions standing outside the chateau at St Gratien to farewell General Birdwood. The chateau was used as headquarters for the AIF. William 'Birdie' Birdwood, a British officer, was appointed to command the Australian and New Zealand forces in 1914 and led the ANZAC corps on Gallipoli. It was he who prepared the plan for the landing. Never regarded as an intellectual or a great strategist, he had strengths as a leader. 'Birdie' was popular with the men, and was sometimes called 'the spirit of ANZAC'. Birdwood continued to command Australians in action in France and Belgium until promoted General Officer Commanding the British 5th Army in 1918. After the war he was warmly greeted by veterans when he toured Australia in 1920. He was promoted field marshal in 1925; he died in 1951.

Arthur Streeton is best known as one of the painters of the Heidelberg School in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century. His name is linked with Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, and Frederick McCubbin as responsible for developing in Australia an impressionist technique of painting, and depicting scenes that embraced the nationalistic concerns of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime he was acknowledged as the finest painter of the Australian landscape; he was the first Australian painter to be honoured by a retrospective exhibition in his own lifetime; and only the second to be knighted.

In 1918 while based in London, he was appointed by the Australian War Memorial as an official war artist and travelled to France to record the involvement of Australians in the battles taking place along the Somme River. During the period of his employment he produced ten paintings and eighty-six drawings that are held by the Memorial. These were all executed in the years 1918 and 1919. The Memorial later purchased his HMS Renown, Sydney Harbour painted in 1922, and commissioned several large paintings of significant wartime subjects.