A. HENRY FULLWOOD English, 1863-1930

Munition Works: The Foundry and Women’s War Work: The Foundry were two of the paintings Fullwood completed in 1918 to record the war effort at home. They were painted in London but deliberately not of specifically identified locations. The First World War was dominated by artillery as no other before it and these foundry workers might have been at Woolwich, Chilwell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne or elsewhere in Great Britain: Fullwood’s aim here above all was to portray the efforts of ordinary people, supporting the might of the Empire. ¹

Here Fullwood depicts the interior of a foundry showing men at work in the First World War-era equivalent of ‘England’s dark satanic mills’. Furnaces are tended on the right while one man pours molten metal into a row of earth-box moulds. On the left a group of men appear to be finishing metal cylinders – possibly gun barrels – seen in silhouette against the fiery glare. Pallets of cast metal are loaded for transport on trolleys; other loads pass overhead; and an internal railway leads into the background where further metalworking processes are in full swing. The heat is palpable; the grit and grease and endless noise unpaintable but felt and heard in imagination.

In the exhibition organised in 1918 at the London Royal Academy by the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists in conjunction with the Society of Australian Artists, Fullwood showed three oil paintings of munitions works alongside a number of his paintings from the Western Front. He may have been inspired in part by the British Ministry of Information’s plans for a great ‘memorial gallery’ devoted to ‘fighting subjects, home subjects and the war at sea and in the air’. Two vast ‘home subjects’ completed for this project in 1918 are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London: In the Gun Factory at Woolwich Arsenal by George Clausen (1852-1944); and A shell forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes by Anna Airy (1882-1968). ²

Compositional parallels between Fullwood’s Munition Works and Clausen’s much larger In the Gun Factory (182 by 317 cm) are interesting but may be due to comparable subject matter, and the artists’ common purpose of celebrating state-directed industrial strength, rather than influence one way or the other. Like Clausen, Fullwood details the machinery and the industrial architecture, but seems at least as interested in the dramatic shafts of light from windows above. Clausen’s painting is believed to have been first exhibited in London in December 1919. However Fullwood would have known Clausen through the Chelsea Arts Club: Clausen was president, Tom Roberts vice-president and Fullwood a member. The Australian impressionists had always admired Clausen’s blend of realism and impressionism. McCubbin’s scrapbook includes a reproduction of one of the English artist’s earlier paintings and Roberts had been to Essex to work ‘where Clausen paints’. In addition, Clausen had been London adviser to the National Gallery of Victoria’s Felton Bequest for two years before the war.

1. Until the outbreak of the First World War, manufacture of munitions in Australia was very restricted due to the absence of an iron smelting and steel industry; see Technology in Australia 1788 – 1988, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne, 1988, revised online edition, 2001, p. 903. The term ‘Home Front’ was in fact coined in the Second World War.
2.  Edouard Vuillard also completed major paintings of munitions works in France in 1917: A Munitions Factory in Lyons: The Forge and The Tower are in the Musée d'art moderne, Troyes; see Art of the First World War, UNESCO at http://www.art-ww1.com/gb/guide/5guide.html#industries.