Previously unpublished portraits of Australian and British soldiers have been released online in a tribute to the Allied forces who fought in France during the First World War.
The pictures, entitled ‘Gallant Boys at the Front”, feature scenes from an Australian military hospital at Wimereux, near the Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer.
They’ve been published with a commentary by Catherine Limousin, an academic at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
The sketches and portraits were found in sketchbooks of the French sculptor, Corneille Theunissen, and his son André.
They show soldiers at the Second Australian General Hospital, and the doctors and nurses who treated them in August 1916, when the Battle of the Somme was at its height.
The hospital had been transferred from Egypt in the wake of the Gallipoli campaign.
Several of the soldiers and doctors depicted in the portraits have been identified.
The pictures can be viewed via the HAL archive website (Sciences de l’homme et de la Societé) together with Catherine Limousin’s commentary in French.
Source: Catherine Limousin & the owner of the collection, Marie-Annick Crosnier Leconte
Images: Coll.privée MCL© C.Limousin
Posted by: CN Editorial Team