After The First World War
After the war, Longstaff continued his art, turning many of his sketches into paintings. Even after leaving the military, he remained in England, eventually settling in Sussex. Beginning the late 1920s, he made return trips to the battlefields of Belgium and France and painted haunting images in a spiritualist style. Among these later works is Menin Gate at Midnight (1927), arguably his most famous, which depicts the ghostly figures of soldiers marching past the monument. The painting toured Australia in 1928–29. It was viewed by record crowds.
The painting is housed in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. In December 2000 Menin Gate at Midnight left the War Memorial on loan to the National Gallery of Australia, the first time it had left the Memorial since its installation there in 1941.
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Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“I am persuaded that the people of the world have no grievances, one against the other. The hopes and desires of a man who tills the soil are about the same whether he lives on the banks of the Colorado or on the banks of the Danube.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)