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.