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Olive Mudie-Cooke. With the V.A.D. Convoys in France, Flanders, Italy.
Cambridge, 1921. 27 lithographs of varying sizes, on grey or white paper, some with
hand-coloring, some with original mounts. Original plate list, signed and dated by
Mudie-Cooke, crudely mounted to remnant of original portfolio. Housed in a custom box.
$12,500.
First and only edition of this collection ofWorldWar I lithographs by war artist
Olive Mudie-Cooke (1890-1925), signed and dated on the plate list.
In 1916, London art student Mudie-Cooke enlisted as an ambulance driver on the
Western Front, driving for both the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (F.A.N.Y.) and
the Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.). For the next two years, she transported
wounded soldiers along the front lines in France, Flanders, and Italy, occasionally
working as a translator for the British Red Cross. Throughout her service,
Mudie-Cooke sketched and painted what she saw around her: field hospitals,
stalled tanks, “Hun pillboxes,” blasted trees, ruined churches, a line of ambulances
parked in a dark forest, “standing by for orders.” Her work is characterized by a
documentary eye, with close attention paid to the logistics of battlefield relief and
the precise damage inflicted on buildings, vehicles, and bodies at the places she
names: the Somme, Ypres, Paschendael. Landscapes are eerily depopulated,
compositions spare and controlled.
After two years at the front, Mudie-Cooke returned to London, where her work
came to the attention of the newly founded ImperialWar Museum. The museum
acquired a number of her paintings, and commissioned more. After the Armistice,
the British Red Cross asked Mudie-Cooke to return to Europe to document the
V.A.D. units still in operation there, and in 1921, her wartime work was the subject
of an exhibition in Cambridge. It was then that these lithographs were produced.
“The artist explained to the ImperialWar Museum—when she requested
permission to reproduce two of the watercolours they had commissioned—that
she was creating the portfolio
With the V.A.D. Convoys in France, Flanders, Italy
‘chiefly as a souvenir album for the V.A.D. ambulance drivers with whom I worked
during the war’” (
50/50: FiftyWorks by Fifty BritishWomenArtists
).With the
exception of three comic caricatures, the portfolio is much more than a keepsake
among friends. These stark lithographs would be the only published work by
Mudie-Cooke, who took her own life in 1925.
The signed plate list includes thirteen images, all present (“Caricatures, Etc.,”
counted as one), with fourteen additional lithographs included as well. It seems
likely that Mudie-Cooke assembled and signed portfolios as needed, pulling prints
that were ready or requested at the time.We locate four institutional holdings of
With the V.A.D. Convoys in France, Flanders, Italy,
each with a different plate count:
two at the ImperialWar Museum (one with 26 lithographs, one with 40), Southern
Illinois (29), and Brown (35). Over the past decade, Mudie-Cooke’s work has
received renewed critical attention, usually in the context of art by women, but
also in the Turner Contemporary’s 2018 “Journeys with
TheWaste Land
” exhibition.
All of her surviving original art is held by the ImperialWar Museum, so the handful
of V.A.D. portfolios (and the individual lithographs pulled from them) are likely
the only other lifetime examples of her work. A powerful eyewitness document of
the GreatWar.
