Forgotten Faces of the Great War: The Wounded Servicemen in Henry Tonks' Surgical Portraits

Henry Tonks’ pastel portraits of the wounded Great War servicemen have perplexed
researchers for years. These stunning pieces of art made by the surgeongone-
artist remain an example of a fascinating but shunned history of the war.
Unlike other war art, usually representing the wounded covered with bandages
or as stoic or martyred heroes, these portraits defy the conventional, idealized
memorializing. They are uncannily raw and frank, with fleshy wounds revealed
and soldiers staring blatantly, almost defiantly at the onlookers, making Tonks’
portraits impossible not to be questioned beyond their medical function. They
were meant to document ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of the wounded, making the
artist a “historian of facial injuries” and thus fulfilling a strictly medical, recording
function. And yet, these portraits pose much more complex questions of ethics,
aesthetics and memorializing, mostly through the ‘healing’ properties of art,
which gave the depicted soldiers back some semblance of humanity they were
stripped off so unexpectedly, losing an important part of their selves, i.e. their
faces. Although focusing on unsettling subject, Tonks’ portraits perform a particular
memorial function since they represent a direct, almost intimate experience of
war, recording a hidden history that contributes to a more coherent and fleshier
understanding of World War I.