“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent Artistic AnalysisTilly Olsson 8D“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent was painted in August 1918 (towards the end of World War I), but published in 1919, according to the Organization of Imperial War Museums, where this painting is now located. This painting was created using oil paint on canvas and measured 231cm x 611cm. John Singer Sargent was an American painter born in 1856 in Florence, Italy. This painting has a landscape form, as well as belonging to a historical or war genre. The angle of this painting is at fairly normal eye level, as if you were a couple of meters away from the scene and looking straight ahead and tilted a couple of degrees down. I can tell because you can see on the painting that Sargent made the ground visible as well. The painting focuses on wounded and tired soldiers, about 11 of them standing and leaning on each other in a row. Most of the soldiers are facing the same direction, looking to the right (from the viewer's point of view), with the exception of two soldiers who are looking the other way. This line of soldiers is aided by another man wearing overalls and a hat, who is obviously not part of their group. Almost all the soldiers we see standing have a white cloth covering their eyes. This line of soldiers walks on what appears to be a series of wooden planks, arranged horizontally. These wooden planks lead a path to several ropes tied to the ground around the soldiers. You can see one of the soldiers in the front row with his leg raised as if he were climbing the stairs, to accentuate the step of the wooden plank. The strings are attached to the dark metal connector that ties the ro... to the center of the card... the American Civil War. No matter what, the war images I have seen all have the same sad, desperate and tired expression of the soldiers who fought that I think the painter was trying to show. This expression that has been like boulders on the shoulders of soldiers will not only go away, but I also see it outside the war; the wars of everyday life. It's almost as if the heavy hearts of these warriors are so heavy that they physically weigh their bodies down to a shrug. I think John Singer Sargent wasn't sent to France just to capture the aftermath of World War I, but to capture the feelings people have after their own wars. I think the feeling of heaviness and pain expressed in this image was not painted just for this particular war, but to represent the wars that people like us, the soldiers, fight in our everyday lives in our own war.