Exhibition: War in the Sunshine: The British in Italy 1917-1918

An exhibition of rarely seen works documenting the role of British forces in Italy during the First World War.

The display includes imagery of official war artists and photographers, and highlights a forgotten aspect of Britain’s involvement in the conflict.

Sydney Carline (1888-1929) produced thrilling drawings and paintings of aerial battles that were much admired by his contemporaries Paul Nash and C.R.W. Nevinson. Carline first created such imagery in his own time as a fighter pilot flying a Sopwith Camel, but was subsequently engaged as an official war artist attached to the RAF.
Ernest Brooks (1878-1941) worked as an official photographer on the Western Front, and is best known for his iconic images of British forces on the Somme and at Passchendaele. The lesser known photographs he took during his assignment to Italy sensitively portray the plight of front-line combat troops and dispossessed Italian civilians scratching a living behind Anglo-Italian lines. The images captured by William Joseph Brunell (b. 1878) reveal an instinctive feel for the stunning views of northern Italy’s mountainous terrain, but he also produced intimate and sympathetic images of the young Italian women employed by the British Army Service Corps, unloading railway wagons or washing British Army uniforms.

The exhibition offers different perspectives on this late phase of WW1, fought in what was said to be one of the most formidable and challenging terrains of the entire conflict.