Charles Ginner, A.R.A. (1878-1952)

In 1917 Ginner joined the Royal Ordinance Corps and in 1917 he became an official war artist for the Canadian government. One of his commissions was an oil painting of No 14 Filling Station at Hereford to demonstrate the role women were playing in the munitions factories. Ginner spent time there making sketches. This work is a preparatory study for the final full sized work now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa which measures ten by eleven feet. The final study in oils of the same scene was exhibited earlier this year at the Tate Britain (London, Tate Britain, Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, February - May 2008, no. 101).
Robert Upstone comments 'The angular, repeated drawing of the rows of women gives them a kind of mechanised character, as if the experience of war work has turned them into human machines, producing material of death' (Exhibition catalogue, Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, Tate Gallery, London, 2008, p. 172).