History painting: market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan

This painting shows Australian, Dutch, and American soldiers with Afghan traders. Its complex grouping of people and elaborate detail repeat a tradition of history painting that represented mythological, biblical, military, and historical subjects. In a 2008 interview Lyndell Brown explained: "With the market painting in Tarin Kowt, we were thinking particularly of nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, French paintings, in "the exotic East". We're sort of channelling the history of art."

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green were deployed as official war artists to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. They observed the international nature of the conflict; represented here in the scene of an Afghan market, hosted in a Dutch military base to improve relationships with local people. Traders mingle with Dutch, American and Australian military personnel with international media recording the event.