The Menin Road
| The Menin Road | |
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| Artist | Paul Nash |
| Year | 1918 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 182.8 cm × 317.5 cm (72 in × 125 in) |
| Location | Imperial War Museum, London |
| Website | © IWM (Art.IWM ART 2242) |
The Menin Road is a large oil painting by Paul Nash completed in 1919 that depicts a First World War battlefield. Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to paint a battlefield scene for the proposed national Hall of Remembrance. The painting is considered one of the most iconic images of the First World War and is held by the Imperial War Museum.
In September 1914, the British government set up a propaganda department at Wellington House to influence domestic and overseas opinion. In 1916 Wellington House established a section to distribute films and publications such as War Pictorial and argued for practising artists to be sent to the Western Front. In 1916, Max Aitken had established the Canadian War Records Office (CWRO), aiming to create an artistic and photographic record of the activities of Canadian forces. In February 1918, Aitken was made head of the new British Ministry of Information (MoI) and subsequently established the British War Memorials Committee (BWMC). The BWMC which began recruiting artists to compile a record of the war in France and at home. Paul Nash had spent the spring of 1917 in the Ypres Salient and returned there as an official artist in November that year. Along with Christopher Nevinson, Nash made a special study of the experience of the Third Battle of Ypres.
In April 1918, Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to paint a battlefield scene, for the proposed, national Hall of Remembrance, which was never built. He decided to depict a section of the Ypres Salient, that had been devastated during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge, at the top of the Bassevillebeek Spur, where the British called a cluster of German pill boxes Tower Hamlets. Nash originally intended to call the painting A Flanders Battlefield but he eventually decided to name it The Menin Road. The actual Menin road, the modern N8, was the main route between Ypres and Menin and passed the sites of several other battles, including Sanctuary Wood, Hooge Crater, Inverness Copse and Hellfire Corner. Nash knew the area well from the spring of 1917, when he served in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front and from later that year, when he returned to the war zone as an official war artist. From late October to November 1917, Nash made some fifty drawings of the front, visiting Hill 60, Gheluvelt, Inverness Copse, Zillebeke and Sanctuary Wood. Nash had come under shellfire when travelling along the route and had the quick reactions of his driver to thank for his survival. He considered Tower Hamlets to be "perhaps the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War".
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