My introduction to the Great War
For my recent birthday, some friends gave me the box set of the groundbreaking 1964 BBC series on “The Great War”. There are 26 episodes and I have already viewed six.
As I watched these pictures of the outbreak of a war that the Germans planned would last a mere 40 days, I was reminded of my first impression of this mammoth conflict.
In the early 1960s when I was in my early teens, I used to visit and stay with my paternal grandmother who lived in Sedgley, just outside Wolverhampton, a village where I was born. I often slept in the front bedroom which was dominated by a large framed reproduction of a dying horse in the First World War with the caption underneath “Goodbye old man”.
Over half a century later, I was wondering if I could find an image of that painting and perhaps an explanation of its origin. Of course, we now have the Internet and Google and the search took seconds.
This is the icture.
I now know that “Goodbye Old Man” was a watercolour by Italian artist Fortunino Matania showing a British soldier saying farewell to his dying horse. The painting was commissioned in 1916 to raise money for The Blue Cross Fund and now hangs in the charity’s animal hospital in Victoria, London.