A. HENRY FULLWOOD English, 1863-1930

Of all Australia’s official war artists during the First World War, A. Henry Fullwood (as he called himself) provided some of the most human images of the servicemen involved. Here in Women’s War Work: The Foundry and in lot 55, Munition Works: The Foundry, he portrays men and women on the home front.

Born in Birmingham, the son of a jeweller, Fullwood at trained as an artist and illustrator before arriving in Sydney in 1883. For five years he was a staff artist for The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and contributed to The Bulletin and numerous other illustrated publications. He joined Julian Ashton, Charles Conder and others on plein-air painting excursions to Richmond and the Hawkesbury; and painted with Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton at Sirius Cove, where his nickname was ‘Uncle Remus’. Fullwood left Australia because of the 1890s depression, travelling first to America and then in 1901 to London. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Paris Salon and in Germany. Too old for active military service, in April 1915 he enlisted, with fellow Australians Streeton, Roberts and George Coates, in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served as an orderly at the 3^rd London General Hospital at Wandsworth.

In 1918 Fullwood was appointed an official war artist with the Australian High Commission and on 10 May he departed for France to join the 5^th Division of the 1^st Australian Imperial Force (Streeton was with the 2^nd Division and George Lambert was in Palestine). As Lieut. Fullwood, he worked near Amiens and St Gratien until August; and was again in France from December until January 1919. ¹ The paintings Fullwood completed in France were mostly in watercolour – a medium that is easy to transport and relatively speedy in execution. Under the terms of his appointment, a large group of these and one very large oil painting, Attack on Peronne, went to the Commonwealth Government and are now in Australian War Memorial.

Many of his First World War watercolours record the daily lives of ordinary soldiers – for example, troops at leisure, the Signal Corps and behind-the-scenes administrators at field headquarters. A few record dramatic moments, such as the Death of Baron von Richthofen; or poignant records of war damage. Perhaps Fullwood’s work at the Wandsworth Hospital, treating wounded soldiers from the front, brought him to the belief that ‘there were sufficient images of horror in the minds of these men for there to be no necessity to create further ones… Without records such as Fullwood’s it is possible that the ordinary routine which occurred during the war might be overlooked: these images convey a real aspect of what went on, and are necessary to a full understanding of what took place’. ²

Women’s War Work shows a young woman, wearing blue overalls and a cap and seated at a large screw press, moulding cast metal components in a busy foundry. Other women are among the workers to her right, overshadowed by the belts and pulley wheels of steam-driven machinery. Numerous photographs of women working in munitions factories – affectionately known as ‘munitionettes’ - were published at this time by Britain’s Ministry of Information. As Lady Randolph Churchill wrote in her remarkable contemporary account, Women’s War Work of 1916, female workers in France and Germany had been making shells since the first month of the war whereas in Britain – and Canada and Australia – women volunteering in industry were still ‘a novelty and a surprise’. ³ Fullwood, with almost journalistic flair, selects those features to which he wishes to draw attention but does not present a mere catalogue of facts. His foundry worker is anonymous, facing away from the viewer, enveloped in heat and noise, and intent only on her dirty, heavy and exhausting job. Fullwood’s message above all, in Jennie Churchill’s words again, is that the ‘new home spirit reaches the highest in every one, touches chords that in many cases have never been touched before... It is to be hoped that this splendid spirit will not die down when peace is restored, that women will not relinquish what they have gained’.


1.  Gray, A., A. Henry Fullwood, War Paintings, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1983, introduction.
2.  Ibid.
3.  Lady Randolph Churchill (ed.), Women’s War Work, C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, London 1916, online version prepared for the web by C. Kay Larson at http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/jenniechurchill.html.