Home again!, 1881, was commissioned by the builder and art collector Sir Thomas Lucas as a companion work to Frank Holl’s Ordered to the front, 1880 (reduced copy in the New Art Gallery Wallsall, Staffordshire, as original is missing), which Lucas had acquired soon after it was painted. Ordered to the front is a classically gloomy Holl painting, showing a group of Highland soldiers taking sad leave of their wives and families at a railway station. Originally titled ‘Summoned for active service’, Ordered to the front was first created by Holl as an illustration for the Graphic in January 1879. In that wood engraving, a newspaper poster on a wall with the text, ‘Daily Telegraph / The Afghan War’, enabled these soldiers to be identified as the 72nd Seaforth Highlanders setting out to participate in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a military conflict between the United Kingdom and the Emirate of Afghanistan between 1878 and 1880.1Mark Bills et al., Frank Holl. Emerging from the Shadows, Watts Gallery and Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2013, p. 141.
Home again! depicts the 72nd Seaforth Highlanders returning seemingly triumphantly from this war, as, accompanied by their wives and sweethearts, they parade to the tune of a Scottish air played by drummer boys and unseen fife players.2When Home again! was exhibited in Melbourne in 1908, the catalogue notes described the painting as depicting ‘The Seaforth Highlanders leaving the docks, with the Drum and Fife band of the Grenadier Guards playing them to the Barracks. When a regiment returns home from active service it is the military custom for the band of another regiment to welcome them and play them to barracks’. Exhibition of the British Art Gallery in conjunction with the Royal British-Colonial Society of Artists, London, Atlas Press, Melbourne, 1908, no. 102, p. 59. The Art Journal (1881) was
glad to see that Mr Holl has not entirely given up subject pictures for portraits. The Highlanders who are marching gaily along … are strong, lusty fellows, full of life and vigour, and there is a refreshing sense of reality about the picture which makes one overlook the comparative roughness of the execution and the over blackness of the shadows.3‘The Royal Academy. The one hundred and thirteenth exhibition, 1881’, The Art Journal, Jul. 1881, p. 215.
The critic for The Times (1881), while arguing that ‘this is another composition which would have been finer in black and white than as at present painted’, praised
a conception which is thoroughly true to itself, and which is powerful in the extreme. On the whole, we are inclined to think this is one of the artist’s finest works, were it only for the intense emotional power with which the leading figures are delineated.4 ‘The Royal Academy. (Fourth notice)’, The Times, 27 June 1881, p. 12.
Recalling that Ordered to the front had been shown at the previous year’s Royal Academy exhibition, the Magazine of Art (1881) sniffed that ‘Home Again! has the slight weakness inseparable from a sequel-picture’.5‘Pictures of the year – II’, The Magazine of Art, 1881, p. 310. Writing for the Fortnightly Review (1881), Edmund W. Gosse felt that
For Mr Holl’s subject-picture, ‘Home Again!,’ a melancholy welcome of the military by the fair, with a touching accompaniment of weeping and drumming, it is not easy to find one’s self in sympathy. It is very clever, smartly anecdotal, and questionably sincere, beautifully painted, and, on the whole, perhaps not worth painting.6Edmund W. Gosse, ‘The Royal Academy in 1881’, The Fortnightly Review, vol. 29, Jan.–Jun. 1881, p. 694.
Gosse’s detection of melancholy in Home again! draws attention to the lack of true celebration in Holl’s painting. The 72nd Seaforth Highlanders participated in four major campaigns during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Thousands of British soldiers were either killed in combat or died from disease between 1878 and 1881 when British forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan. In Holl’s Ordered to the front the soldiers, immaculately dressed, bear expressions of both resignation and trepidation. In Home again! they seem jaded and battle-shocked to judge from the eyes of both the central soldier and the drummer boy. While bearskin caps are waved in the air or hoisted up on bayonets, the soldiers’ uniforms are dishevelled and undone, and one man limps along with a crutch. These men are doubtless glad to have made it home alive, but there is little to celebrate in Holl’s depiction of them. In this respect Holl may have been influenced by the new treatment of war art that Elizabeth Thompson brought to this genre in the 1870s. Her work Calling the roll after an engagement, Crimea, also known as The roll call, 1874 (Royal Collection, London), had shown a bedraggled assembly of wounded and exhausted survivors of bloody conflict; an entirely new way of imaging the heroism of Britain’s military forces.
It is curious that a contemporary commentator on Holl’s work writing in 1889, Gertrude E. Campbell, while recognising the pathos of Holl’s Ordered to the front, which she felt was ‘perhaps the finest picture, apart from his portraits, which he ever painted’, saw none of this sadness in Home again!:
The companion picture to this one, ‘Returned from the Wars’ or ‘Home again’ as it was called when it was exhibited in 1881, is by no means as fine as ‘Ordered to the Front’. Joy is far more difficult to depict successfully in Art than sorrow, for vulgarity is waiting round the corner for the artist who would portray joy, and often succeeds in substituting herself as model.7Gertrude E. Campbell, ‘Frank Holl and His Works, The Art Journal, Feb. 1889, p. 57.
The Athenaeum (1881), however, did appreciate the pathos in Holl’s depiction of the 72nd Seaforth Highlanders, noting how
Mr. Holl has depicted the Guards’ return, wounded, wasted, weather-beaten, from the wars. Always lugubrious, this artist has here indulged in what is, for him, unprecedented action, energy and movement among the figures, and a good bright, out-of-door effect of daylight. The highest effects of Mr. Holl’s ability, feeling, and skill appear in the face of the jaded young woman, sister or mistress, who trudges gleefully and almost hysterically at the side of a gaunt soldier, on whose arm she hangs, undecided whether to laugh or cry.8The Athenaeum, no. 2796, 28 May 1881, p. 724.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
