Journal of War & Culture Studies

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Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

Marguerite Helmers

To cite this article: Marguerite Helmers (2010) Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks,
Journal of War & Culture Studies, 3:2, 181-199, DOI: 10.1386/jwcs.3.2.181_1

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 JWCS 3 (2) pp. 181–199 © Intellect Ltd 2010

Journal of War and Culture Studies

Volume 3 Number 2
© Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcs.3.2.181_1

MARGUERITE HELMERS
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Iconic images of wounded

soldiers by Henry Tonks

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
During World War I, British painter Henry Tonks created 72 pastels of soldiers show- World War I
ing the pre-operative status of facial wounds. Working for surgeon Harold Delf Gillies medicine
at the Cambridge Military Hospital and Queen Mary’s Hospital, Tonks not only soldier
depicted the physical condition of the men but also offered a sense of their human- art
ity and suffering. Not widely displayed to the public until recent interest in the full rhetoric
graphic record of the war reasserted their value, Tonks’ images of wounded service- Henry Tonks
men are now iconic because they allow audiences to see what was kept hidden: the
horrific consequences of mechanized warfare on the human body. Drawing from mod-
ern rhetorical theory, this article examines the portraits of Pte. William Fry and Pte.
Walter Ashworth. The article posits viewing as a transaction between the properties
of the image and the situation of the viewer, in which the spectator is an active creator
of meaning.

Iconic images capture public imagination and shape public opinion. In No Cap-
tion Needed, a study of the effectiveness of influential American photographs,
rhetorical critics Robert Hariman and John Lucaites assert that images such as
the flag-raising at Iwo Jima by US Marines have acquired ‘exceptional impor-
tance within public life’ (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 45). Particularly interested
in photographs of the Vietnam War, Hariman and Lucaites establish that ‘War
by its nature is a violation of civility, normalcy, civic order’ (Hariman and
Lucaites 2007: 176). Yet due to that very violation of normality, images of war

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Marguerite Helmers

1 As this article was in create a public sphere that is called ‘to a moral awareness’, to an ‘obligation’ to
press, Emma judge the unfolding events of history (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 178).
Chambers published
‘Fragmented Hariman and Lucaites’ criteria may be extended beyond late-twentieth-
Identities: Reading century photographic imagery to artistic works produced in Britain during
Subjectivity in Henry World War I, particularly those which, although not unknown in their day, are
Tonks’ Surgical
Portraits’. Predicated only recently receiving a degree of frank appreciation in artistic and histori-
on the idea that ‘the cal literature: the collection of fine pastel portraits of soldiers created by the
power of Tonks’
surgical portraits for
British painter Henry Tonks, assigned to assist surgeon Harold Delf Gillies in
modern viewers lies in his efforts to repair the shattered faces of soldiers injured in battle. Not widely
the way that they’ displayed to the public until recent interest in the full graphic record of the
portray the suffering
of individuals rather war reasserted their value, Henry Tonks’ images of wounded servicemen have
than ‘symbolizing quickly become iconic because they allow audiences to see what was typi-
sacrifice through an cally kept hidden, to make present what is absent: the horrific consequences of
idealized universal
soldier’ (Chambers mechanized warfare on the human body. Sandy Callister argues that it is time
2009: 603), Chambers that the record of the severely wounded treated by Gillies be included in the
concludes that the
viewer constructs the
history of the war. The record of these disfigured men has been ‘conspicuously
identity of the subject. absent’ from ‘war historiography’ because ‘they do not easily slot into any of
the existing mental pictures [the public] has formed of the Great War’ (Callister
2007: 112). Epideictic rhetoric, which relies on qualities of display and demon-
stration, is particularly apt for a study of Tonks’ pastels because the archived
medical illustrations offer a strong visual counterpoint to widely familiar war
illustrations such as recruiting posters, imaginative battle illustrations, cartoons
and formal portraiture of the time. Commenting on ‘visual portrayal’ as ‘the
dominant rhetoric of our time’, Lawrence Prelli reminds viewers that ‘whatever
is revealed through display simultaneously conceals alternative possibilities;
therein is display’s rhetorical dimension’ (Prelli 2006: 2).1
Henry Tonks created 72 pastels of British, New Zealand and Canadian sol-
diers showing, in painstaking detail of line and colour, the pre-operative status
of their facial wounds. In World War I, the number of wounds to the face and
head far outnumbered those of any previous war due to the nature of trench
warfare, in which the body was covered by the walls of the trench, but the
head was exposed. Furthermore, new and lethal weapons – sniper rifles, flares,
shells, shrapnel – exacerbated the type and extent of injuries to the head and
posed technical problems for surgeons. ‘The close range, and relatively low
muzzle velocity of the rifles, meant that when a bullet struck it produced a
big entry wound [. . .]. Shot side on, a soldier would lose his nose and face, and
perhaps be blinded’ (Bamji 1994: 12). Recognizing the long-term importance
of their medical contributions to aesthetic and reconstructive surgery, Gillies
and his team at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot and at Queen
Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup documented their work extensively through detailed
case notes, photographs and drawings. Tonks’ work is revelatory for its bru-
tal frankness. Therefore, a visual rhetorical investigation questions the effect of
images on the viewer. As Christine Harold and Kevin DeLuca write, images
may become sites around which action is concentrated, a virtual ‘gathering
place’ that produces ‘real situations’ (Harold and DeLuca 2005: 277). Thus the
image is not a passive or neutral record of one moment, but a dynamic enact-
ment of rhetorical exigency. Although it may be possible to trace the histories of
the soldiers and to look for personally recorded memories of their sensations or
the recorded reactions of orderlies, nurses and doctors working in the wards,
the visual turn of rhetorical scholarship shifts the inquiry to how the images
themselves make meaning. In order to perform such an act of visual reading,
the properties of the image itself must be studied. Thomas Benson writes that

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

inquiry into ‘the ways the text positions the spectator as an active participant
in the making of meaning’ results in the study of how meaning emerges, rather
than what meaning can be fixed to the image (Benson 1986: 197). Who looked
and what they saw may be isolated historically through diaries and case notes,
but in many ways those instances of viewing are fixed in a historical moment of
the past. If viewing is to be understood as a transaction between the properties
of the image and the situation of the viewer – in other words, if viewing is to be
understood as a rhetorical act – then visual interpretation is diachronic as well
as synchronic. Rhetorician Sonja Foss argues that a ‘viewer attributes meaning’
to a visual work through ‘a critical, reflective analysis of the work’ (Foss 1986:
329). Carole Blair calls on scholars to ‘ask not just what a text means, but more
generally, what it does’ (Blair 1999: 23).
In an effort to consider how the Tonks portraits of injured servicemen work
as a rhetorical transaction between image and viewer, I have limited my focus
to two images in this study, selecting those images that suggest a moral aware-
ness and that imply an obligation, even if, at the distance of almost a century,
the obligation is only to bear witness. W. J. T. Mitchell writes in his intriguingly
titled What Do Pictures Want? that certain pictures ‘have been marked with all
the stigmata of personhood. [. . .] They present, not just a surface, but a face
that faces the beholder’ (2005: 30; emphasis in original). This idea seems espe-
cially true for portraits in general, and for the Tonks portraits in particular. In
traditional portrait sittings, the awareness of a public audience results in the
need for sitter and painter to put the best foot forward, to perform an ideal
identity for the artist (Brilliant 2004: 11). Instead, as Callister notes, images of
disfigured soldiers from the Great War ‘assault our sensibilities’ (Callister 2007:
113). Yet, they elicit in the beholder a particular kind of tenderness towards
their subjects, even though the men depicted are strangers and, often, name-
less. Mitchell continues by citing Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality
(1980),

a painting . . . had first to attract the beholder, then to arrest and finally to
enthrall the beholder, that is a painting had to call to someone, bring to
a halt in front of itself and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to
move. (Mitchell 2005: 36, ellipsis in original)

Mitchell advances the idea that pictures may be gendered feminine, as they
attempt to bedazzle and attract, to hold the gaze. The picture itself becomes an
‘animated’ being, a ‘mock person’ (Mitchell 2005: 46).
There are few artistic appreciations, evaluations or theoretical explications
of Tonks’ wartime work, and even Tonks does not mention it in his autobi-
ographical fragment ‘Notes from “Wander Years” ’ (1929); however, all who
respond to these images note that they are significant not only because of
novelty of subject, especially at a time when the War Office forbade the rep-
resentation of the dead or severely injured as bad for public morale, but also
because of the ‘restrained compassion’ evidenced by the artist in rendering
his subjects, the ability of the portraits to hold the gaze (Freeman 1985: 293).
Tonks’ formal exhibition work was known for its domestic, ‘tender and poetic
homeliness’ (Anon 1937: 16), particularly works depicting women in ideal-
ized environments. Thus, the ‘wounded soldiers who had their faces knocked
about’, as Tonks himself described them (Freeman 1985: 286), were a signifi-
cant departure in subject matter for him. The work required the practised eye of
an anatomist, with an understanding of skeletal structure and tissue, and the

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Marguerite Helmers

resulting portraits were notable in Tonks’ oeuvre because he employed some

modernist techniques in completing the images, techniques notably absent
from his typically conservative work.
Tonks’ portraits are of unquestioned value to the history of medicine.
Francesca Kubicki cites the number of patients treated for facial injuries:
‘Between 1917 and 1925, 11,000 operations were performed and 5000 ser-
vice men were treated at Sidcup and associate hospitals’ (Kubicki 2009: 185).
Gillies used several of Tonks’ pastels in his textbook Plastic Surgery of the Face
(1920). In addition, the portraits are significant in the oeuvre of Henry Tonks, a
professor of drawing at the Slade School in London who had trained as a sur-
geon and who, in turn, taught many important artists of the modern period.
Occupying a middle ground between depicting the horrors of trench warfare
and the heroism of the surgeons assigned to repair the broken faces of the
men, Henry Tonks’ medical illustrations were considered for propaganda use.
Encoded in this promise of a public showing was an implied contract with the
public: if servicemen were severely injured by technologies of modern war,
they could be made whole again through technologies of modern medicine.
Kubicki reports that such exhibitions were not a rarity. For example, plaster
casts of German faces ‘were exhibited in hospitals in France, Germany and
King’s Hospital London, where thousand [sic] of people visited on holidays in
awe of the terrific suffering’ (Kubicki 2009: 193). Tonks’ biographer J. P. Bennett
reports:

The pastel drawings were [. . .] the subject of a correspondence with the

Ministry of Information on their use for propaganda purposes but Tonks
was not enthusiastic about this. He writes in a letter of 18th August 1917
to the Ministry, ‘The pastels of which [sic] I have done are of wounded
soldiers with face injuries. They are, I think, rather dreadful subjects for
the public view. As far as I am concerned they are entirely at your service,
any publication of them would, I suppose, be at the discretion of the War
Office.’ (Bennett 1986: 15)

Those critics who have attempted to articulate a space for the wartime pas-
tels initially attempt to place them within a genre. Lubbock is adamant that
they are neither propaganda nor protest (Lubbock 1999: 58). He and Emma
Chambers agree that the portraits can be classified as ‘technical illustration’
(Lubbock 1999: 58) and ‘archival’ (Chambers 2002: 13). It is the fact of the
wounds that increases the interest, artistic value and cultural significance of
the images. As Lubbock perhaps too dismissively states, ‘Undo the damage,
and you’d have a gallery of male portraits of very moderate interest’ (Lubbock
1999: 59). And Lubbock is critical of the accuracy of the portraits as technical
illustration, finding them ‘vague, suggestive’ (Lubbock 1999: 59) rather than
scientifically precise, a point that Joseph Maunsell Hone also raises in his biog-
raphy of Tonks when he comments somewhat obscurely that the illustrations
are ‘a graphic form of the phenomena rather than a detailed diagrammatic
appearance’ (Hone 1939: 129).
Yet Lubbock, Bennett, Hone and Julian Freeman also point out that the
value of the pastels lies in ‘characterisation’ (Hone 1939: 129), Tonks’ ability
to transcend the physical to show the ‘working of minds’ (Bennett 1986: 14).
Bennett captures the idea that the portraits work upon the viewer to create an
emotional response:

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

In the eyes of those portrayed, the expression of pain, anxiety, resignation

and anguish makes them one of the most moving and impressive records
of human disfigurement which have been handed down to us. They are of
more impact than photographs because the artist has, in a sense, instilled
his sympathy and understanding into the record. (Bennett 1986: 15)

The work of Ana Carden-Coyne suggests that any subsequent silencing of

Tonks’ work in the official history of the war related to societal anxiety. Injured
soldiers could not be smoothly integrated as productive, working citizens,
although post-war re-integration was construed as a societal necessity; a re-
masculinization of mutilated, and therefore dependent, bodies; and a way of
carrying on or forgetting the disruption of war:

Arguably, the damaged body of the citizen soldier symbolises the pre-
carious, liminal zone between war and recovery, and more specifically
the unsuccessful transition of the acquiescent, militarised body into one
characterised by civilian self-sufficiency. (Carden-Coyne 2007: 544)

Gillies’ case notes from Queen Mary’s Hospital at Sidcup and his published
record of war injuries, Plastic Surgery of the Face, indicate that, for many soldiers,
the hospital experience was not a ‘temporary space of rehabilitation’ (Carden-
Coyne 2007: 549) but a prolonged series of operations designed to recreate a
face that was as near to the ‘normal’ face of the soldier as could be managed.
However, as Kubicki (2009: 185) points out, ‘From the medical texts, Gillies’
files and others [sic] descriptions it is hard to get a real sense of what these
patients went through’. The integration into official histories of pictorial works
of Henry Tonks and A. D. Macalister and the photographic images from Harold
Delf Gillies and Albert Norman persistently remind the contemporary public
of the human element of war. By particularizing experience to a single soldier,
visible as a body in pain, the war is construed not as so many engagements of
troops, but as the life history of an individual. Thus, studying visual images of
wounded soldiers integrates the vernacular histories of individual soldiers into
official histories of the war.
Plastic Surgery of the Face offers insights into the culture of the hospital and
the suffering of the men. Treatments involved not only several operations but
also considerable healing periods between the operations, plaster casts being
made of the face (while in recuperative states), photography, drawings and
implants (such as ‘strong iron wire’ [Gillies 1920: 62]). Patients were often fed
through tubes. At times it was three months or more between the time of injury
and the time that the patient arrived at Gillies’ surgery. In this time, the wounds
had healed improperly, resulting in an abundance of resistant scar tissue and
facial depressions caused by the absence of underlying bone, cartilage and tis-
sues. Not all patients were happily accepting of the treatment, but whether this
was due to fear of the procedure, anger at the injury, post-traumatic stress or a
combative personality is not clear. Bamji notes that

reading between the lines of the plastic surgery records there was clearly a
great deal of psychological disturbance among those with facial injuries,
and patients would abscond, refuse to return for follow-up surgery or
have frightful rows with the staff and be thrown out. (1994: 25)

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Marguerite Helmers

It was often the case, however, that although the patients could probably
have looked better with one or two more surgical procedures, they had to be
sent back to the front. This was the purpose of the hospital after all – to repair
the men enough to rejoin their regiments and resume battle. Although in his
textbook, Gillies refers to the soldiers anonymously, the case files in the Gillies
Archives at Queen Mary’s Hospital connect each Tonks image to a specific
patient. In addition to being named, some of their military history is related,
at least the part that relates to their injuries and their medical history under
the care of Dr Gillies. However, when Tonks’ pastels are reproduced in journal
articles, books and on the Web, they are frequently used as examples, repre-
sentative illustrations of the pity of war rather than as visual biographies of
individual men. John Taylor writes that ‘Reality is always lost in the acts of
picturing and describing, which means that agony and death are never fully
present’ in images (1998: 4). Furthermore, there is a tradition of encouraging
medical illustrators to seek ‘anonymity in patients, instructing them to avert
their eyes and so turning individuals into types or specimens’ (Taylor 1998: 3).
In rhetorical terms, the subject of the portrait is medical advancement, specifi-
cally the development of plastic surgery. As a consequence of the soldiers being
abstracted into injury types, modern viewers become interested in the personal
histories of the men. Yet the endeavour to learn more about individual histories
is, at present, a challenge for scholars. Lubbock confirms that there is ‘no record
of the patients seeing or responding to [Tonks’] portraits’ (Lubbock 1999: 59).
Therefore, in this study, I settle for the time being on an approach to the
images that explores them as acts of communication. From the Tonks oeuvre,
I have selected the cases of Pte. William Harold Fry and Pte. Walter Ash-
worth because the men are named, their case histories are represented in Plastic
Surgery of the Face, and the images themselves raise interesting questions about
intertextuality and communicative possibilities.
Pte. William Harold Fry’s injury is classified under ‘Injuries of the Nose’ in
Gillies’ textbook. Fry was wounded in France: the shell penetrated his face at
close range on 2 February 1916. The shells contained a fuse that ignited magne-
sium which burned ‘practically the whole of the interior of [Fry’s] nose’ (Gillies
1920: 254). He was admitted to hospital in Aldershot two months later, on 8
April 1916 (Figure 1). When he arrived, the exterior of the wound had already
been covered by what Gillies describes as ‘Excessively thick, non-yielding scar
tissue’ (Gillies 1920: 254). Fry underwent four operations to reconstruct his
nose, the first of which took place six months after the injury: 15 August 1916,
19 September 1916, 3 October 1916 and 8 December 1916. In Plastic Surgery
of the Face, Gillies reports on the nature and treatment of Fry’s injury as ‘Case
10’, abstracting Fry into an anonymous set of medical conditions and, as Tay-
lor writes, negating the presence of ‘agony’ in order to emphasize technical
medical details (1998: 4). In the following explanation of Fry’s injuries from
the textbook, note that the name of the soldier is removed and instead, the
impersonal pronoun ‘it’ is used to refer to the wound:

In the first place, it is one of two examples of a star-shell burn in our

clinic, and represents the effect of a magnesium flare fired from a Verey
[sic] Light pistol at close range. It is the more deplorable because of the
foolish nature of the accident. (Gillies 1920: 254)

While Gillies’ rhetorical choices to de-emphasize the person are neces-

sitated by his audience of medical colleagues, he nonetheless succeeds in

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

Figure 1: Tonks, Henry, Portrait of Private W. H. Fry (1916), RCSSC/P 569.68

c The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

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Marguerite Helmers

‘turning individuals into types or specimens’ (Taylor 1998: 3). Gillies does not
elaborate on Fry’s accident, so readers do not know why it was ‘foolish’. A star-
shell pistol, also known as the Very pistol (named after its inventor Edward
Wilson Very), sent up a flare to illuminate the battlefield at night and thereby
detect any enemy patrols. The flare burned for only a few seconds, but exited
the flare gun at a velocity sufficient enough to propel it several hundred feet
above the battlefield.
Four photographs in his file (and three in Gillies’ textbook) detail Pte. Fry’s
recovery. They demonstrate the process of growing the new cartilage of the
nose on his arm, which was then grafted to his nose so that the skin and
cartilage can grow there. In the last photograph, marked ‘first nasal position’,
Fry looks at the camera, but he is weary. The new nose is present, but awaits
final modelling. While Fry was allowing the new nose to grow into place, his
arm bandaged to his head, he apparently suffered from bouts of vomiting. His
vomit infected the new skin area, but at this point, Fry was strong enough to
fight the infection and the creation of the new nose was successful. On the
third operation, 3 October 1916, case notes record that ‘A cork was inserted
on right side and a piece of composition was moulded over the lower teeth
to plump out the left cheek’. However, three days after his fourth operation,
Fry was stricken by both erysipelas (a bacterial skin infection caused by strep-
tococcus) and gangrene. He also developed ‘septic bronchopneumonia, from
which the patient died in isolation hospital’ (Gillies 1920: 254). Fry died on 31
December 1916 at age 19. Gillies labelled Fry an ‘incomplete case’ and he rather
sadly appends a note that comments on the exigencies of wartime operations:
‘There is no doubt that more time should have been allowed to elapse between
operations, but at that time conditions were such that it was rather important
to proceed as quickly as possible with cases, one’s judgment notwithstanding’
(Gillies 1920: 254).
Tonks’ portrait of Pte. Fry (Figure 1) is immediately striking because the
wound blots, but does not obliterate, Fry’s classical beauty as a subject. A par-
tial profile portrait, the way that Fry’s head is turned away from the artist and
viewer accentuates the long line of his bare neck, which Tonks has empha-
sized with a demonstrative line of black crayon extending from Fry’s left ear to
the implied shoulder line. The neck is even attenuated, accenting the classi-
cal pose. Fry’s turned head and averted eyes suggest the patient and dignified
suffering from the iconography of the saints. At the same time, Tonks’ portrait
challenges Taylor’s assertion that individuals become ‘types or specimens’ (Tay-
lor 1998: 3) because the gracefulness of the pose is characteristically poignant
under Tonks’ artistry: acting as a site of sentiment, the image directly appeals
to viewer’s emotions, rhetorically affecting the pathos of Fry’s condition. Tonks
was always careful about crafting the patients’ hair in war portraits. Fry’s hair
is a golden brown, clean and full of shine. The right side of his face and his
forehead are similarly clean and are coloured in shades of rose, tan and grey.
As with other portraits in the series, Tonks has dug into the yellow shades to
colour the wounded left side of the face. Moving forward from the left ear,
across the cheek and down the neck, the patient is coloured a golden yellow,
interrupted by grey shading along the left jawline and under the left eye. The
depression in Fry’s face, caused by the destruction of the underlying tissue,
has pulled his nose and mouth to the left side and his left eye drops down-
wards towards the hole that opens widely near his left nostril. Tonks has taken
customary care in depicting the wound; rather than colouring a black abyss,
he has pulled again on the yellow crayon, a red and blacks to illustrate the

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

underlying facial structure of the nasal cavity. Surrounding the entry point,
touches of whites, greys and slight blends of blue mark the healing tissue; but
it is the extensive red path of burn from above the left eye to the midpoint of
the neck that draws the eye inwards towards the wound.
Viewers of Fry’s image may note its similarity to the portrait of a more
famous World War I soldier, the poet Rupert Brooke (Figure 2). At age 27, in
April 1915, Brooke died of sepsis on his way to Gallipoli. A 1913 image of
Brooke by Sherril Schell has been widely reprinted because it emphasizes the
simple classical Greek beauty of Brooke’s form. Like Fry, the line of the neck is
emphasized; unlike Fry, Brooke is in full profile. Brooke’s image became sym-
bolic for all the Doomed Youth of the war. As Florence Tamagne points out,
‘Worship of the body followed naturally in the wake of the great carnage of the
war of 1914’ (2004: 34). Brooke’s image became emblematic of ‘youth in flower,
mown down by guns’ (Tamagne 2004: 34) and the myth that sprang up around
Brooke’s death created icons of ‘the adolescent heroes for their beauty and
their youth’ (Tamagne 2004: 34). The intertextual visual relationship between
Fry’s image and that of Brooke gives Fry’s portrait an added persuasive appeal:
Fry is one of the Doomed Youth of World War I. The association between the
poses of the two soldiers raises the issue of moral obligation: viewers are thus
positioned as witnesses to suffering. The juxtaposition of Brooke’s pristine and
familiar profile with Fry’s damaged face draws attention to the act of war as a
violation against the body.
The portraits of Pte. Walter Ashworth are notable in the Tonks series
because, unlike the others, there are images of Ashworth before his surgery
and after his surgery. When placed together, the difference in appearance chal-
lenges the conception that a portrait reveals a timeless essence of a person. For
in the case of Ashworth, the portraits reveal such a difference of appearance
that one would hardly believe this to be the same man. Ashworth was a mem-
ber of C Company, the 18th West Yorkshire Regiment, which sustained close to
500 casualties in the fighting at the Somme, including their commanding offi-
cer. Pte. Ashworth was one of the casualties of the first day of fighting. He was
wounded in France on 1 July 1916 (a written note in his medical file contains
the notation ‘Somme’) and was admitted to Aldershot four days later, on 5 July
1916. Ashworth was one of the influx of over 2000 men sent to the hospital
from the Battle of the Somme. He was 23 years old.
In Plastic Surgery of the Face, Ashworth is placed under the chapter ‘Repair
of the Cheek’. His wound resulted in a loss of jawbone and soft tissue, mak-
ing repair difficult. The first of three operations took place on 4 October 1916,
three months after the initial wound. It was necessary to try to draw the skin
together to close the wound, which, even after three months of healing, had
not repaired itself, although scar tissue had knitted together the open flaps.
As there was not quite enough skin to cover the area of the left cheek, Gillies
found that ‘The result of this plastic operation was very satisfactory in so far
as one operation produced a result which satisfied the patient; but it left the
man with a whimsical, one-sided expression which, however, was not entirely
unpleasant’ (Gillies 1920: 62).
Four photographs and two line drawings (Figures 3 and 4) in the files of
the Gillies Archives outline the plan for the plastic operation. In the first image,
taken just after incurring the injury, Ashworth is lying in the hospital bed, head
back against a pillow, a sheet pulled to his chin. His entire lower face is meaty
and torn from the left side of his nose to his chin; his mouth has disappeared
and what remains is an open, jagged and swollen hole. He stares off beyond

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Marguerite Helmers

Figure 2: Schell, Sherril, Rupert Brooke (1913), NPG P101(b), reproduced by kind permission of the National
Portrait Gallery, London.

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

the camera (not at it), into a middle distance. In the next image, taken after
the wound has healed but before the first surgery in October, he is wearing
headgear with prosthetic dental apparatus intended to assist the healing of the
jaw. The next two photographs were taken two weeks after the plastic surgery
and one year later; Ashworth is obviously scarred, but smiling that ‘whimsical,
one-sided expression’ (Gillies 1920: 62). As his jaw never completely knitted
together, Ashworth was discharged in September 1917 as unfit for further mil-
itary service and placed on a permanent diet; his file at the hospital records,
‘only able to eat soft diet on account of the effect on the soft tissues caused by
original wound’.
Tonks’ images of Ashworth are a bit more imaginative than the pho-
tographs. In particular, the image of Ashworth created at the time of his
admission to Gillies’ surgery depicts Ashworth craned forward, his chin resting
over a white bowl (Figures 3). The bowl, towel and background share the same
spare whiteness of the prepared paper, offering an antiseptic feel to the image
and drawing the eye to the angry redness of the wound. He wears the same
towel around his neck, but in the Tonks image, we see the colour and shoul-
ders of his hospital blues. His wound appears to have healed somewhat from
the date of the photograph, especially around the lower lip area. Tonks, noted
for his accuracy in rendering the faces due to his training as a surgeon, shows
the skin has closed over the wound on a large portion of the face. Nonetheless,
the wound and the distended nature of Ashworth’s mouth are emphasized
by the bright red crayon, highlighted with a slight amount of lavender along
the upper and lower lips. Ashworth’s face is carefully rendered in yellow, grey,
green and brick, and a kind of dirty unshaved aspect to his face is created by the
smearing of deep grey and black crayon to the forehead and cheek. Unlike the
refined and careful blending of Fry’s hair, Ashworth’s hair is roughly pencilled;
this roughness extends through the shoulder line of his jacket. The colours and
the rough line hold the viewer’s gaze and render a moral attitude towards this
tear in the physical face and, by extension, the civil fabric of society. While not
propaganda, the image nonetheless engages the viewers in a horrified gaze –
not towards the man, for whom one feels pity, but for the acts of war that lead
to such an injury. Tonks’ sensitive rendering of Ashworth’s pain, disfiguring
wound and dependent physical condition display that which is typically hid-
den, positioning the image as a site around which resistance and pathos can be
figured.
Remarkably, despite Ashworth’s condition, in the initial pre-operative por-
trait Tonks captures the light blue-grey of Ashworth’s eyes; as he stares off
into a middle distance, his right eye sparkles as it captures the light. This
is one of Tonks’ marks of delicacy, a notable feature of his work. This same
sparkle is evident in the post-surgical portrait of Ashworth (Figure 4). His right
eye is coloured with the same clear blue, while his left, somewhat clouded,
is rendered in violet. In the second portrait, post-surgery, Tonks has cleared
Ashworth’s face, minimizing the yellows and the dark greys and blacks. Ash-
worth’s hair, rather than a tangled and barbed mass of black lines, is now
a delicate puff of gold, smoothed into a shining copper. The remains of the
injury, now repaired, are rendered in rose and salmon; the surrounding skin is a
recuperative chalky white and grey. Ashworth’s permanent, surgically induced
half-smile is evident in his post-operative portrait. The way that Tonks has Ash-
worth cant his head slightly to the right gives him a puckish appearance. Tonks
has augmented the finished aspect of this portrait by adding in a blue-grey
background.

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Figure 3: Tonks, Henry, Portrait of Private Walter Ashworth (1916–1918), RCSSC/P 569.50
c The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

Figure 4: Tonks, Henry, Portrait of Private Walter Ashworth (1916–1918), RCSSC/P 569.52
c The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

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The fact that before- and after-images exist of Ashworth testifies to the skill
of Gillies. In other words, the pairing of the images implies an argument, a
promise to viewers that repair is possible. As Sander Gilman comments, the
after-image attests that the patient has ‘entered into a new category of visi-
bility’ (1999: 40). Yet this visibility is one that is tied intimately to the hands
and design of the surgeon for it is ‘the prowess of the surgeon not only in
altering the body but also in representing the altered state of mind of the
patient’ (Gilman 1999: 39). There is a resolution of the biography of Ash-
worth in Tonks’ post-surgical image; his smile constructs the portrait as the
‘mock person’ of Mitchell’s conception. It is a dynamic image, expressing both
a commentary on the past and an expression of hope for the future. Like Fry’s
pairing with Brooke, Ashworth’s two portraits work dialogically; each image
is a commentary on its double, enhancing our understanding of injury and
recovery.
Portraits are texts that exist to be interpreted visually. Yet it is a curious and
important point to note that the patients’ disfiguring wounds were often dif-
ficult to look at in life, thus amplifying the difficulty of placing them into the
category of artistic portraiture. Lubbock notes that Gillies said that the men
were ‘maimed to the condition of animals’, ‘tragic’ and ‘grotesque’ (Lubbock
1999: 58). Freeman calls the portraits ‘ghastly’ (1985: 286). Even Tonks called
the ward at Aldershot a ‘chamber of horrors’ (Bennett 1986: 13). In nurse Mary
Borden’s short story ‘In the Operating Room’, the mass casualties after a battle
reduce patients to individual body parts. A nurse announces, ‘Three knees have
come in, two more abdomens, five heads’ (Borden 2008: 89). In her study of
the artistic contributions of Anna Coleman Ladd to wartime facial reconstruc-
tion, Caroline Alexander cites the comments of Dr Fred Albee, an American
orthopaedic surgeon working in France:

A more upsetting encounter, however, was often between the disfigured

man and his own image. Mirrors were banned in most wards, and men
who somehow managed an illicit peek had been known to collapse in
shock. ‘The psychological effect on a man who must go through life, an
object of horror to himself as well as to others, is beyond description’,
wrote Dr. Albee. ‘It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted
person to feel like a stranger to his world. It must be unmitigated hell to
feel like a stranger to yourself.’ (Alexander 2007)

As these wartime injuries and their graphic illustrations suggest, a new con-
sciousness of seeing emerged as a result of trench warfare. During the period
of conflict, 1914–18, popular illustrations of handsome soldiers constructed one
mode of signifying the war. While hundreds of published works by illustra-
tors such as Fortunino Matania, Wilmot Lunt and Bruce Bairnsfather did not
ignore the hardships of war, they nonetheless represented the fighting man as
hearty and not altogether unpleasant to regard. In the post-war period, visual
culture emphasized the transitional nature of hospitalization and the positive
aspects of societal re-integration: ‘Posters and photographs of disabled vet-
erans training and working, often with fitted prostheses, were put on show’
(Carden-Coyne 2007: 548). Image-makers praised the virtues of hard work and
fortitude; the dominant message of these images was a ‘rhetoric of overcoming’
(Carden-Coyne 2007: 548). Tonks’ portraits challenge the popular iconography
of ‘overcoming’ and have therefore become instrumental in refiguring the war
in modern consciousness. The power of the portraits emerges from their very

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 Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks

existence: they show what was hidden. Furthermore, the portraits are situated
at the complex border of medical documentation and traditional portraiture. As
portraits, the pastels recall lived experience and biography, while still embed-
ding the idea of the wounded soldier as an object for medical science and
rehabilitation. As Emma Chambers writes, ‘These images negotiate the uncom-
fortable ambiguity between the portrayal of the sitter as “object” (a record of
medical procedure) and as “subject” (an individual whose subjectivity is worthy
of celebration through portraiture)’ (Chambers 2002: 15). To borrow Mitchell’s
phrase, the ‘mock person’ of Tonks’ portraits, although adhering to the tenets
of realism, is physically fragmented by the machines and institutions of the
Great War:

Here [in the Tonks portraits] likeness is pushed to its limits, the phys-
ical appearance of the face as a guarantor of identity is disrupted, and
the viewer’s response alternates between a horrified gaze at the areas of
wounded flesh, and an attempt to locate the inner identity and personal-
ity of the sitter through reading emotions (of pain, resignation or bravery
for instance) into the eyes. (Chambers 2002: 15–16)

Ironically, despite their ability to attract and repulse, the classification of the
portraits as medical illustrations shifts the subject from ‘the patient to the
wound itself and to the skills of the surgeons’ (Callister 2007: 124). Reaction
to the photographs of the patient – but not the pastel illustrations by Tonks – is
recorded in book reviews of Gillies’ Plastic Surgery of the Face. It is notable that
the photographs are praised as ‘splendid’ and ‘wonderful’ for their candour and
their usefulness for further surgeries:

Of the splendid photographs themselves, demonstrating the progress of

the cases from their outset, through various stages to the end-result, too
much cannot be said in praise. [. . .] In very many of these cases the
injury was so extensive, so repulsively mutilating, that the manufacture of
shapely, living features would seem well-nigh impossible. Even in these,
the results are truly wonderful, the photographs amply testifying to the
surgical wizardry of this master of the plastic art. (Anon 1921: 203)

Returning to the language of Hariman and Lucaites that opened this article,
Tonks’ images transgress norms of civility inherent in the portrait genre, thereby
constructing an audience that is compelled to bear witness to the soldiers’
suffering and constituting a sphere of inquiry into the material conditions of
injury and recovery. Wounded soldiers were an importunate reminder of the
war for decades after the Armistice (Reznick 2004: 130). The question of their
re-integration into society and the persistent visual presence of their condition
served to remind the public of collective loss. Furthermore, in a wartime cli-
mate that censored anything bad for morale and in a post-war climate set on
forgetting the conflict, Tonks’ portraits never entered the space of permanent
public viewing. Francesca Kubicki (2009: 193) confirms that ‘Images of these
brutalized faces [. . .] may not have been acceptable for public consumption, or
indeed nationalist agendas’.
Moreover, it is arguable that painted, photographic and published images
of damaged soldiers occupy a liminal space between war and national recovery,
what Reznick has termed the process of physically and psychically ‘healing the

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Marguerite Helmers

nation’. The continuous presence of wounded and recovering men marked an

eternal recurrence of the past that hindered forgetting and the creation of new,
progressive, official, national narratives. As Carden-Coyne writes, ‘disabled
veterans presented [. . .] a disturbingly visible problem’ (Carden-Coyne 2007:
550). It was important to American and British governments to reconstruct
the disabled soldier as dutiful, useful, strong and even congenial and grate-
ful (Carden-Coyne 2007: 546–47). Through Carden-Coyne’s work, a glimpse of
the competition between official and vernacular histories is evident. The male
body was overwritten with rhetorical imagery, persuading viewers that, while
war might be ‘a violation of [. . .] civic order’ (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 176),
social order could be reconstituted through superior medical treatment and
meaningful employment. Yet, aside from the writings of what some histori-
ans call the elite group of War Poets and the published memoirs of officers, the
record remains silent with regard to what individual soldiers felt during combat
and during recovery from injury. Many of the men of Henry Tonks’ portraits are
certainly silent; their histories must be reconstructed from the recorded experi-
ences of regimental histories, diaries and memoirs of other soldiers and other
wounded. Some of this work is being completed in official histories of dis-
ability. Wendy Gagen, for example, sensitively represents the experience of
a single soldier, Lance Corporal J. B. Middlebrook of the King’s Royal Rifle
Corps, whose complete archive of his wartime experience includes extensive
reflections on his injury, treatment and shifting sense of self. An amputee, Mid-
dlebrook had to ‘negotiate a new identity’ (Gagen 2007: 527). Labels used to
describe individuals offer possible identities for them to inhabit: ‘soldier, citi-
zen, patient and civilian’ (Carden-Coyne 2007: 546), ‘ex-soldier’ (Gagen 2007:
529), ‘survivor’ (Gagen 2007: 535), father, son, husband, worker, ‘independent’
and ‘dependent’ (Gagen 2007: 536), even normal, natural, amputee, wounded
and cripple.
The bodies of the men were and continue to be the objects of several gazes:
those of physicians, those of nurses, those of families, those of the artist and
those of the viewers of the artist’s portraits. Each of these gazes is located in a
particular time and place, emerging from the material conditions of viewing. At
heart is the question of the body on display. As Stephanie Brown Clark points
out, ‘If the eye became the predominant and determining sense as the means to
knowledge after the nineteenth century, the physical body, normal and abnor-
mal, had the distinct advantage of its visibility’ and the ‘body was privileged
because its material surface could be observed’ (2004: 134). Among the soldiers
who survived the war, thousands returned home with visible physical defor-
mities; these wounds not only affected the soldier’s sense of his own identity
but also created new forms of identity for those surrounding them. How the
soldier looked engendered a sense of being looked at, while the viewer was –
and continues to be – cognizant of looking.
Portraiture as a genre typically offers us idealized images of notable persons
in history; yet, if it were not for the extraordinary nature of their misfortune, the
subjects of the Tonks portraits might still be some of the anonymous numbers
of common soldiers who fought for their country. Yet these unbandaged men
expose their wounds like the martyrs of the Christian tradition. Largely enlisted
men from the infantry, their faces defiantly or accusingly address the viewer;
some, like Pte. Fry, turn their broken faces to the side to show the horrors
of war: a missing nose, a lost chin, an eye drifted downwards to where the
cheekbone should be. Like American photographs of the Vietnam War in the
analysis of Hariman and Lucaites, the Tonks portraits have acquired exceptional

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importance in studies of World War I. In his study of plastic surgery, Sander

Gilman reads the faces rhetorically, as important to the iconography of war:

No more horrible result of war could be represented in the public sphere

than the mutilation of the face. [. . .] These images of the reconstruc-
tive surgical patient as the representation of what war means evoked the
stench and horror of the trenches. [. . .] Even the rebuilt faces were under-
stood as so grotesque as to mirror the anxieties about the impact of the
war on everyone’s humanity. (Gilman 1999: 159)

Even with a surgically altered and normalized face, did the men return to the
society unmarked? Gilman notes,

[t]he question of ‘passing’ is not raised with the faces reconstructed by the
surgeons following the battles of World War I. There is never any doubt
that the only cadre into which they could ‘silently’ pass would be that of
the war-wounded. (Gilman 1999: 168)

The faces would be read as the sign of war, a memory of tragedy persistently
visible. As acts of epideictic rhetoric, Tonks’ images represent the effects of war
on the human figure in a way that was not intended to be propaganda or art.
They transcended their use as medical illustration to capture the humanity of
the men, activating viewers’ desires to learn more about the individual histories
of the soldiers and positioning viewers as active interrogators of the images as
rhetorical texts.
Without written personal reflections of these particular men, viewers are no
closer to documenting their individuated experiences and sensations. Yet it is
almost impossible for viewers to constrain their interest to the surface level of
the paper; instead, viewers are compelled to look through the pastel window
to imagine the experience of the man who is represented. The image thus per-
forms its role as Mitchell’s ‘mock person’. Pastel and paper are a gateway, what
C. S. Peirce called an ‘index’ of the suffering of the men (Peirce 1982: 53–54).
The portrait represents the violation of civility and normality that is war. The
viewer is uncomfortably conscious that the men recognized their own extraor-
dinary appearance, even if they were denied the mirrors to prove their altered
state to themselves. In this transaction between image and viewer, this silent
passing of knowledge, the image constitutes the spectator as an active creator
of meaning.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the many individuals and organizations that assisted this
research, including the Faculty Development Board and the Kimball Family
Foundation Endowment, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, for funding travel
and sabbatical time; Dr Andrew Bamji, Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup for
sharing case files of the soldiers under Dr Gillies’ care; Zoe Brealey, Hunte-
rian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, for providing access to the Henry
Tonks portraits; and staffs of the Forrest R. Polk Library (University of Wiscon-
sin Oshkosh), Ebling Library (University of Wisconsin Madison), Wehr Library
(Medical College of Wisconsin) and the National Art Library (Victoria and
Albert Museum).

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Helmers, M. (2010), ‘Iconic images of wounded soldiers by Henry Tonks’,
Journal of War and Culture Studies, 3: 2, pp. 181–199, doi: 10.1386/jwcs.3.2.181_1.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Marguerite Helmers is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin
Oshkosh. She is the author of The Elements of Visual Analysis and co-editor
of Defining Visual Rhetorics and The Traveling and Writing Self. Her publications
include additional books and journal articles on the subjects of art and rhetoric.
Contact: University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Boulevard, Oshkosh,
WI 54901, USA. Tel: +1 920 424 0916. www.english.uwosh.edu/helmers
E-mail: helmers@uwosh.edu

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