Het Kunstuur (Mechelen & Roeselare, Belgium) recently acquired The Fighting-line from Ypres to the Sea by William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931) from the Maas Gallery. It was exhibited in the 9th exhibition of Het Kunstuur Mechelen and is now shown (untill 14/06/27) in the 4thexhibition of Het Kunstuur Roeselare.
Wiliam Lionel Wyllie was perhaps the most celebrated marine artist of his day. Amongst his nine children, two of his sons were killed in the Great War. One of them, Robert Wyllie, died early in the war on 31 October 1914 at the Battle of Messines, at the Ypres salient depicted in the our painting. His body was never found, and probably lies to this day in the mud below. Wyllie's eldest son Harold served as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, and he is in his biplane on the left of the painting. Harold had been intended for the Navy, but failed his examinations and turned to art. In 1898 he went to New York as a special artist for The Graphic, then served in South Africa during the Boer War. In the Great War, after the Royal Flying Corps, he gained a commission in the Army, which he left in 1920 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Wyllie was then a student with Frank Short, having prior to the war studied with his father, Thomas Graham Jackson and Edwin Austin Abbey, the American painter. There is a dramatic oil painting by Harold Wyllie in the Imperial War Museum, Artillery Observation: BE2c Machines over Hooge Ranging British Guns by Means of Wireless Telegraphy, 1915 1920.
In Wyllie’s biography, his wife Marion wrote: 'In 1915 Bill had five pictures in the Royal Academy, all stirring subjects to do with the War. Perhaps the picture that made the most stir was 'The Fighting-line from Ypres to the Sea.' A man had to be placed by the picture to move on the officers in khaki who pored over it, discussing the spots from the air that they all knew so well. Painted from the air, it showed our son's aeroplane flying in the foreground, with Ypres to the sea at his feet; Bill was always a master of perspective, and what would have been difficult to another man came quite easily to him. We have this picture in our own collection. There was a question between Harold and his father as to the possibility of seeing the sea from the height depicted in the picture; but, in the first letter he wrote after his return to the front, he said, 'You were quite right, Pater. I saw the sea from my 'plane this morning.''
MA Wyllie, We Were One - A Biography of WL Wyllie
G Bell and Sons,1935
pp 217&8
Wyllie, being a senior Royal Academician, was entitled to show six pictures at the Summer Exhibition each year without going through the Selection Committee process, which in 1915 was in February. The Exhibition did not open until the beginning of May, and Wyllie probably painted this picture at short notice and at speed, using his training as an illustrator, because it appears to depict a sortie of his son’s, made perhaps as late as April. In the typescript of Captain Wyllie’s private flying log for 26th and 28th April 1915 (IWM Documents.3862) two typical sorties are recorded, between Ypres and Ostend:
'Early reconnaissance with Hawker. Canal bridge, Moorslede, Beselere, Terhand, Zandvoorde. Brought two Germans to action and chased them down. Met a third who gave us hell with a machine gun. He plastered the air with bullets five of which hit us. One striking my steel plate, ripped my cushion across, and cut the back of my chair Knocking a big hole in the other side of the machine. Went out [a second time] with Kinnear. Poelcappelle, Terhand, Houthen, Oosterveen.- Shelled by Archie [anti aircraft fire].'
Two days later he went out again, and again encountered enemy biplanes:
'4 am. Went out with Kinnear to sketch battle line. Did it. Brought two Germans to action and they went off nose down. Went to Vlamatingue with report. Bloody sight - been shelled - dead men and horses.'
Throughout March and April that year Captain Harold Wyllie, with the 6th Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, was mostly drawing German trenches observed from the air onto maps, for army use. It was incredibly dangerous work - over half of 6th Squadron were killed or wounded in action or accidents. In the manuscript of his lecture On Maps used for Reconnaissance (IWM Documents.3862) which Capt. Harold Wyllie gave to new fliers, he advised gluing a map to a specially made folding board which 'stores quite well against the side of the fuselage if you have finished your reconnaissance or want to fight a Hun … Whenever you cross the lines look very carefully for signs of fresh digging … Sketch it on your map and when you get down make a neat tracing on squared paper and hand it into your general who can lay it straight on his map and see at a glance what is happening. Remember that information of this sort if given at once may save the infantry from a "regrettable incident”.’ Engaged in this task, they were frequently shot at with anti aircraft fire (known as ‘Archie’, it could come from either side) and with rifles from the ground and from German aircraft. Some biplanes at this stage were equipped with machine guns, usually firing backwards, but it was not until Schneider’s synchronised firing mechanism was developed by Fokker to allow machine guns to fire forwards through the propeller without hitting it that aerial dogfights developed, of the 'Red Baron’ kind, from the summer of 1915. In the painting, Captain Harold Wyllie is flying the BE 2c biplane in the left foreground. He first flew one on March 1, recording in his private log for that date 'My first flight in "Stability Jane” [the nickname of the BE 2c]. Liked the feel of her very much’. Although BE stood for Blériot Experimental, the plane was designed and made in Britain. The pilot sat in the back and the observer in the front, with a telescope and a rifle, and sometimes a machine gun. There were no parachutes carried. The observer could fire backwards, past the tail and over the pilot’s head, and could also drop bombs by hand. Wyllie lectured: 'If you are armed with a rifle in a BE 2c ask your pilot to always try and keep a Hun machine on your port quarter. Then you can kneel up in your seat and get in steady shooting, and reload from the right hand pocket in your coat. A good thing to do is to take one or more spare magazines ready charged as it is quicker to shift magazines than to load in the ordinary way. Get the fore end of your rifle altered to the shape of an ordinary sporting pattern. The wood along the barrel catches too much wind and puts you off your shooting. When you have had your rifle altered, fire it at 200 yards and correct the site. 200 yards is about the best range to engage at.’
The French Armée de L’Air sesquiplane (meaning one and a half wings) on the right is a Caudron G3 (called a 'Cauldron' by the Brits). The two German biplanes in the background at which Wyllie’s observer is shooting are DFW B1 (stood for Deutsche Flugzeug Werke, the factory where they were made just outside Leipzig), known as 'Flying Bananas' because of the shape of their wings.
Jessica Feather, in a piece on the RA’s website entitled 1915: A New Type of War Painting, wrote that 'The start of the war had unleashed a huge public appetite for visual images, reports, and other stories from the Front. This came across in reviews of the Exhibition that year, when the critics demanded that “art should be doing its bit like all the other activities of the realm.”' Men in uniform were given free admission to the Summer Exhibition, constituting a military audience of all ranks, and they 'wanted to see new technologies and the impact of modern warfare such as aeroplanes and tanks’. Wyllie’s picture very much fitted this new demand, and several critics called it their 'Picture of the Year’.
Amongst the many reviews in the newspapers, perhaps the most typical was in the Daily Mirror for Saturday 1 May 1915:
'Mr. W. L. Wyllie be really happy this year, for, after years painting warships in peace time, he has been able to paint the real thing. He has five pictures hung this year. One of them will undoubtedly be a picture of the year—or the diagram. It is called "The Fighting Line from Ypres to the Sea," and shows the district from the airman's point of view, with shells bursting all over. On the frame are painted the names of the various points and places we know so well through the communiqués, to indicate their positions. There was a big crowd round the picture all day.'
The Daily News called it 'the most discussed picture in the Academy’. It must have been extraordinary for men who had fought in the trenches below to have seen what Ypres looked like from the air, and to be able, with the place names marked around the frame, to have worked out exactly where they had been. Actually, the crowds around the picture may have been arguing about the frame, because most of the places on it marked on it as north of Ypres are in fact south of it, just out of the picture. However, Truth magazine simply found the picture beautiful:
'At first sight you could think it was a rainbow fairy fancy. Really it is an aeroplane surrounded by exploding shells, from which can be seen below fire-trenches, burning villages, roads, canals spread out like a map. Admitting that the aviator could appreciate the full beauty of bursting shells at close quarters, Mr. Wyllie has produced rather a fine fantasy. It is quite remarkably pretty, and suggests the other end of the rainbow rather than a battlefield.’
WL Wyllie followed up the success of The Fighting-line…. with a similar watercolour exhibited at the RA in 1916, no 476, called The Hooge Salient.