Damaged war art

Civilian with donkey cart by Ernest Herber Thompson, 1916.

A bit of the Cloth Hall, Ypres by Cecil Trevithick, 1918 (click on thumbnail for larger image).

Examples of badly damaged paper sketches in New Zealand's National Collection of War Art.

At the end of the First World War, the New Zealand Expeditionary Force's official war art collection was sent back to New Zealand. Plans to exhibit the works in a National War Memorial Museum in Wellington came to nothing when this building project was cancelled. Instead, the collection was shifted to the Dominion Museum (Te Papa's predecessor), where it was placed into long-term storage. By the 1950s, some of the works were suffering from having been kept in damp conditions for several decades.