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    Vanished Armies: A Record of Military Uniform Observed and Drawn in Various European Countries During the Years 1907 to 1914.
    Vanished Armies: A Record of Military Uniform Observed and Drawn in Various European Countries During the Years 1907 to 1914.
    Vanished Armies: A Record of Military Uniform Observed and Drawn in Various European Countries During the Years 1907 to 1914.
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    Vanished Armies: A Record of Military Uniform Observed and Drawn in Various European Countries During the Years 1907 to 1914.

    By AE Haswell Miller and John Mollo

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    About this ebook

    In the years immediately before the First World War, Archibald Haswell Miller, a young artist, travelled Europe to study painting. While he was there he indulged his other great interest the military. On his travels he observed first-hand the soldiers of the European Armies in the last days of the colourful and elaborate uniforms that were giving way to grey and khaki across the continent. Realising that this was a great military heritage that was slipping away he set out to record these splendid uniforms. In those uncertain days before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Haswell Miller sketched and painted hundreds of figures, each wearing a different uniform, from the armies of Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Just before the First World War the paintings were exhibited in Leipzig, and it seemed they might be published. But when war broke out they were returned home and lay forgotten for nearly one hundred years. Now published together at last, they represent a unique record of the uniforms of the last great age of military dress. Accompanied by, in Haswell Miller's own words, 'notes and memories of the days before “the lights went out in Europe” in the year 1914', this is a book of great historical importance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJan 20, 2013
    ISBN9780747813118
    Vanished Armies: A Record of Military Uniform Observed and Drawn in Various European Countries During the Years 1907 to 1914.

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      Book preview

      Vanished Armies - AE Haswell Miller

      PREFACE

      This beautiful collection of paintings of military figures is by Archibald Elliott Haswell Miller, a Scottish soldier, painter and historian. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1906 to 1908, becoming a probationary professor, and then travelled to study in Paris, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. The book results largely from those travels and illustrates the uniforms of British and other European armies, mainly from 1908 to 1914, reflecting a period of military elegance soon to be eclipsed by the horrors of the First World War. During that war, Haswell Miller served with the 7th (Blythswood) Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry in Gallipoli, Palestine and France. He was awarded the Military Cross, attained the rank of Captain and continued to sketch and paint as opportunities arose. He became a prolific painter of military portraits, and his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists, Glasgow Institute and elsewhere.

      Haswell Miller died in 1979, aged ninety-two. For the last twenty-five years of his life he was an adviser to the Army Museums Ogilby Trust. It was through this connection that the paintings came into my possession when, in 2006, his daughter sought my help in sorting through his material, some of which had been carefully stored for over seventy years. She was extremely generous in the disposal of some original works to regimental museums and expressed a strong desire that this collection of paintings and notes be published.

      Colin Sibun

      Director, Army Museums Ogilby Trust

      EDITOR’S PREFACE

      Information about the dress of the armies of Europe in the last years before 1914 can be found in numerous separate publications, but it is rare to find it all together in one book, and certainly not one illustrated with figures as colourful and lively as those reproduced here. Eyewitness information is always the most regarded, both for its artistic quality and as confirmation, or otherwise, of the regulations, soldiers being well known for having ideas of their own as to how they should dress. The beauty of this book lies in the fact that these are eyewitness sketches, the plates being reproduced from the pages the artist tore out of the sketchbooks he carried with him at the time.

      Haswell Miller, as he was generally known, was, in his own words, born into a ‘rather nondescript class’ in Glasgow, in 1887. At an early age he developed a deep interest in military uniforms and had enormous difficulty in finding out anything about them. After studying at the Glasgow School of Art, under the eminent painter Maurice Greiffenhagen, who had only just taken charge of the Life Department, he embarked in the autumn of 1908 on the first of several European tours, which lasted on and off until the outbreak of war in 1914.

      It was on the first of these, in Munich, that he set about recording the soldiers he saw on the streets in a small sketchbook. From the evidence of some of the unfinished pages which are included here, and other pages of rough sketches and notes, it is clear that his method was to make a quick pencil sketch of his subject, jotting down the details and colouring of the uniform on the back or on a separate page. He then worked this up at his leisure, gradually building up the density with numerous layers of watercolour, and finally strengthening the whole image with bravura pen and ink work, paying particular attention to the face. At a later date, probably when the idea of a book first occurred to him, he numbered the figures, and wrote a caption in pencil on the backs of many, but not all, of the pages. His tutor, Greiffenhagen, was a portrait painter, and it is obvious that he passed much of his skill on to him. Haswell Miller’s style is instantly recognisable, and I think it is the naturalness of the poses and the intense characterisation of the faces, rather than the finer details, although they are there, that make his work stand out among his contemporaries.

      The title and sub-title of the book are the ones he originally gave to it; but in spite of the wording of the latter, he continued his sketching right through the war, taking advantage of moments of leave and recuperation from the wound he received in the final advance in 1918, when he was awarded the Military Cross. Most of the plates contain two rows of five or more figures, but from the beginning of the war years he changed this to a single row of larger figures, sometimes with an ornamental border, as though he already had the idea of a book in mind. Early in 1919 he sent a drawing of the peace and wartime uniforms of his regiment to Charles ffoulkes, the secretary of the recently established Imperial War Museum, and as a result was commissioned to paint sixty-five watercolour groups along the same lines. This was probably when one of the then small group of enthusiastic students of uniform, L. E. Buckell, remarked to a fellow enthusiast: ‘Who is this young man who draws soldiers that look like soldiers?’ He soon became part of this group, which contained such luminaries as the Reverend Percy Sumner, the historian S. M. Milne, the civil servant and amateur artist P. W. Reynolds, and the professional artists Harry Payne and C. C. P. Lawson. The work of these pioneers came to fruition in 1921 with the founding of the Society for Army Historical Research, which put the study of uniforms on a serious footing. An early member, he was eventually to write the catalogue of the military drawings and paintings in the Royal Collection together with fellow enthusiast Nick Dawnay.

      As a child, I spent most of my time drawing and, like Haswell Miller, developed a very keen interest in the same subject, suffering like him from a lack of information; in fact I relied mainly on The Wonder Book of Soldiers, cigarette cards supplied by my mother and the occasional Harry Payne postcard. It was not until 1940, when C. C. P. Lawson published the first volume of his History of the Uniforms of the British Army, that a serious book on the subject came my way. Through a series of happy coincidences I met ‘C. C. P.’ while I was still at school; he became a great friend and my ex officio professor of military history; and it was through him that I met Haswell Miller, although unfortunately I never got to know him very well.

      Haswell Miller’s obituary in the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research describes how, well into his nineties, he travelled once a week from his home in Dorset to Whitehall and the offices of the Ogilby Trust, to which, for the last twenty-five years of his life, he was artistic adviser. What is less well known, however – and I have it from an impeccable source – is that on each

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