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Gill wrote to Lord Beaverbrook in May 1918 proposing himself as an official artist. At this time he was marked for home service only, having been invalided home in March 1918 after more than 2 years in France.
Permission for him to be spared from his post in the Camouflage School was initially refused but then granted. Gill chose as his subject for a British War Memorials Committee picture, 'Heavy Artillery' (IWM:ART 2274).
The file includes details of his career and correspondence relating to administration of his expenses and arrangements for his trip to France, where he went on 7 November 1918 to refresh his memories of the Front, returning 14 December. Gill wrote enthusiastically of what he saw there, and his stay was longer than initially planned, at his own request.
In one letter after his return (55) Gill reports rumours of artists being treated "shabbily" by the Museum.
The file also concerns arrangements for Gill's portrait of the Australian VC, Jacka (IWM:ART 1915). There is a presscutting about Jacka's return to Melbourne in 1920 at (107).
Gill finished his large picture in August 1919 but his original plan for a picture of Mons was abandoned in favour of a "gunner" picture (presumably IWM:ART 2281). Gill wrote details of the subject matter of a number of his works, at (102-103): IWM:ART 2274, 2279, 2280, 1209, 1210 and 2297 respectively.
By 1919, Gill was back at the British School in Rome, where he had originally gone in 1913, from where he wrote regarding the Royal Academy show and the favourable critical reception he received; he also mentions a picture he is painting for the Canadians.
The file ends with a letter from Blaikley to Gill enquiring about the whereabouts of the sketch Gill made of the troops entering Mons at the Armistice, mentioned in (48), and an obituary of Gill, who died in 1940.
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