Gunner F. J. Mears, Royal Garrison Artillery

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Gunner F. J. Mears, Royal Garrison Artillery

Unfortunately, nothing is known of Gunner Mears' early years, but his experiences during the Great War played a very important part in the way he interpreted the war and how he put brush and paint to paper. He saw action on the Somme and in the Salient. In an article he wrote after the war, he said his paintings expressed the whole spirit of the war - of as it is, as the soldier sees and not as seen by the conventional artist. It was a picture of shattered trees crying aloud, as he himself puts it, against the horror of it all; of dark, sinister pools of mud, of a troubled sky and of insignificant little crouching figures running across a shell-swept road. It expressed - what an artist had wanted to express - the utter insignificance of men crushed by the pitiless machine of war.

In a cutting from the Daily News dated 7th May 1920, under the headline "Art genius who paints in a garret. Lowly man's pictures bought by aristocracy. Dukes as customers." which neatly summarises Mears' tale of poverty, war-disability and discovery as an artist. Thirty of his pictures were exhibited at 20 Old Bond Street, London, in 1920. Amongst the buyers were Lady Astor, Major General Gough and the Duchess of Norfolk. The proceeds from these sales enabled Gunner Mears and his wife to have their first meal for weeks. The paintings were noted for being signed in pencil, but upside-down. When asked by a reporter from the Daily News, the ex-Gunner replied "The whole world is upside-down. Why should only my signature be the right way up ?"

There is little doubt that his nightmarish experiences lived with him for the rest of his short life, for he continued to draw the same type of scene time and time again. Even when he found time to paint in the 1920s, he was haunted by what he had seen. The landscape had changed little, the trees were now in leaf, but the soldiers running across roads or going up the line were replaced by the Grim Reaper. Mears died in 1929.

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David Cohen Fine Art