Iso Rae The German Ward, Étaples, WWI
Eva
Eva reviews what she has written: Iso Rae was not asked to draw that war, but she did it anyway. She recorded the life and doings of our men as diligently as any of the official war artists. Then she hesitates.
‘Don’t you think it’s curious,’ Eva says to the curator, ‘that Iso Rae drew so few women? Before the war she painted them all the time.’ She gets out her phone and shows the curator all the images she’s collected.
The last is her photograph from the National Gallery of Woman in Garden.
‘What about all the nurses, the ambulance drivers, the women she must have volunteered with at the YMCA? They are almost completely absent from her war drawings.’
‘Not completely absent,’ the curator says. ‘It’s probably time you looked at the sketches.’
The envelope of sketches is as large as the base of the archive box.
It’s the kind that folds in on all sides and Eva’s been told it’s full of false starts and studies.
Nothing of value, according to the expert.
‘But let us know if you think otherwise,’ the curator says. Eva consults the label on the envelope:
Iso Rae
The German Ward, étaples, WWI
Fragments, subjects unknown.
‘The German ward,’ Eva whispers. It is full of potential and the thought tingles across her skin. She opens the envelope and slides the sketches onto the bench.
There are dozens of them and it will take time to examine them properly, days or weeks. It doesn’t matter. No one is waiting to hear what she thinks, so she can take her time – an hour here, an hour there, whenever she can fit it in. Today she must be satisfied with just a taste.
There are women and men and disembodied details.
They are on sketch paper and lined paper and the backs of old postcards.
Postcards with images of étaples on the front.
étaples before 1914. étaples when it was nothing more than a fishing village and an artists’ colony and was known for its light as the sun set over the River Canche.
Now it is known for its cemetery.
Iso has used pencil mostly but also charcoal. Occasionally there is a bit of colour. If these sketches were words, Eva thinks, they’d be initial ideas or outlines for an argument.
Some are more formed than others and one or two could have joined the archive of original drawings – they fill the page and have been given a border in black and blue crayon – but in every case there is something missing. Something Iso has left undone.
They are beginnings, Eva thinks, and she tries to imagine what they might have become if Iso had had the time, or motivation, to complete them.
GW is written in the corner of every sketch, left or right, top or bottom, wherever the sketch allowed.
Sometimes there is a year but not usually.
There are no useful descriptions and none have been signed.
Eva regrets the scarcity of time stamps and decides to arrange them by subject.
Seeing them spread across the bench, she feels the excitement of emptying a jigsaw puzzle of a thousand pieces at the start of a long weekend.
There are a lot of body parts, though that’s not quite right.
They are parts of bodies, Eva thinks, disembodied on the page but hopefully not in real life.
Iso has focused on sketching someone’s hands, their feet, an arm, a torso, the curve of a neck, the shell of an ear.
The hands are most plentiful, on their own or holding something, and often there are two together.
They are drawn in proximity, side by side or reaching for something that is barely there.
The hands are not all the same and Eva imagines they belong to patients and nurses and doctors. One sketch shows two hands. A man’s and a woman’s, subtle differences in size and shape and the tapering of fingers. They are back to back and almost touching.
She begins to separate the sketches into tentative categories.
As well as hands and feet and arms and torsos, there are people, their limbs attached but still incomplete.
There is clothing that identifies a matron, a doctor, a VAD – caps, collars, capes, coats.
Simple lines that need no elaboration. The doctor is often furnished with a stethoscope, the VAD with a cross on her apron and sleeve.
When Iso has applied some colour, it is red.
Their faces are barely drawn, and only in profile, but Eva thinks it is the same matron, the same doctor, the same VAD. Their figures are consistent and there is something that hints at character.
There are a few patients, or parts thereof.
There is a stretcher between two pairs of arms. There is furniture and miscellany.
A metal-framed hospital bed, a desk, a cylindrical fuel stove with its flue going nowhere.
In one sketch there is a vase of flowers on the stove – pencilled stems topped with smudges of yellow. Summertime, Eva thinks.
Some sketches are not of the ward. They are outdoors. Near the German ward, perhaps; on the way to or from. They still have GW in their corner.
Among the sketches there is a folded piece of paper.
It is the only thing left to consider. Eva picks it up and is reminded of the sealed section of a women’s magazine – a vicarious pleasure when she was young.
Not every issue had a sealed section, but when it did it promised something explicit, words or pictures that would make you blush.
She would wait. She would read every article and appreciate all the fashion.
She had to earn the pleasure and could delay it for hours, sometimes days, before tearing open the seal.
Eva thinks of Woman Stretching and begins to unfold the paper that the artist had folded more than a century ago. She is careful and hopeful. The edge of a heavy breast, the hint of a nipple…
But she is disappointed and a little embarrassed. The sketch is un-remarkable. A doctor beside the bed of a patient. Eva looks around, as she might have as a teenager, but the curator is absorbed in her own work.