Hon Lt Lt Alfred Théodore Joseph Bastien born 1873 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium. While serving in the CEF with Canadian War Memorials Fund, employed as a war artist (at his own expense), and at one time attached to the 22nd Battalion (Royal 22e Régiment), painting several snipers of the “Van Doos” on the battlefield.
Alfred Théodore Joseph Bastien (16 September 1873, in Ixelles – 7 June 1955, in Uccle) was a Belgian artist, academic, and soldier.
Bastien served in the Belgian Army from 1915. Designated an official artist in 1916, he was placed at the disposal of the Canadian War Records Office in October 1917 and assigned to paint for the Canadian War Memorials Fund. Most of his time was spent with the French-speaking 22nd Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts
Bastien attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Ghent, where he studied with Jean Delvin. He then enrolled in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He won the Prix Godecharle there in 1897. Bastien traveled to Paris, where he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts. He was there when hostilities broke out in what would become the Great War. After serving in the ”Garde Civique” like many other Belgians, Bastien fled to Great Britain after the fall of Antwerp in October 1914.
Despite his age (43) Bastien had volunteered for the Belgian Army. He was eventually transferred to the ”Section Artistique” in Nieuwpoort along with many of his pre-war artist friends and acquaintances. From 1915, he made many drawings and sketches of the situation on and behind the Belgian lines on the Yser river. The British war-time magazine ”the Illustrated War News”, among others, regularly published his work, quite often in distinctive and semi-panoramic, multi-color two-page spreads.
Alfred Théodore Joseph Bastien
In 1917, on personal request by Lord Beaverbrook who owned several of Bastien”s pre-war paintings, he was seconded to the Canadian Army until September 1918. In July/August 1918, Lieutenant Bastien attached as a war artist to the Canadian 22nd Battalion. Some of the work he created in this period is part of the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
Bastien axamined on 27 May 1918, aged 45, standing 5′ 10″ tall, 170 pounds, at Southampton St, Strand, London. Occupation – Artist (painter). Married to Madame Bastien, 10 Rouge Cloitre, Auderghem, Belgium. To be Temp Hon Lieut without Pay and Allowances.
Belgium
Gas Attack Flanders
Gas Outpost
Canadian Cavalry Ready in a Wood
Gate of St Martin Ypres
Ypres Salient from Kemmel Hill
Captain Joseph Jules Desjardins, 8 June 1918
Father Joseph Jules Desjardins the Chaplain of the 230th Battalion (1916-1917). With Chaplain Services in 1918, attached to No. 8 Canadian Stationary Hospital, Etaples.
Canadian Gunners in the Mud, Passchendaele
Belgian artist Alfred Bastien had just begun working for the Canadian War Memorials Fund when, on October 26, 1917, General Currie led the Canadian Corps into the mud for which Passchendaele now notorious. Lieutenant Brooke Ferrar Gossage, serving with the 66th Battery, wrote in his diary: “New Bty position an awful mud hole simply covered with mud all the time and generally wet.”
By November 7, with losses numbering over fifteen thousand, Passchendaele was secure. Bastien has depicted a group of gunners struggling to release one of their guns from the mud. The focus on the gun, rather than on the soldiers, underlines the importance of this weapon to success on the battlefield. The terrible shelling and constant rain reduced the Passchendaele battlefield to a sea of mud. Here, a group of artillery soldiers struggle to free a mired wagon.
France
Over the Top, Neuville-Vitasse, c. 1918
Bastien depicts an attack by the 22nd Battalion at Neuville-Vitasse, a German-fortified village in occupied France, in late August 1918. Major Georges Vanier, later the Governor General of Canada, maintained that he was the officer holding the pistol leading the assault.
Painted by Alfred Bastien in 1918. Bastien’s watercolour study captures the heart-pounding experience of going “over the top.” The soldiers scrambling over the trench parapet are Canadians. They are retaking the French village of Neuville-Vitasse from the Germans in August 1918.
La Grande Place, Bethune
Pernes-en-Artoi
Outpost at Nieuport
Canadians in the Dust, Vimy
My Dugout
Place d’Arras
A Sniper in the Cemetery, Neuville-Vitasse, c. 1918
Outpost, Neuville-Vitasse
Painted by Alfred Bastien in 1918 This soldier, wearing a helmet and a gas mask haversack, is on observation duty in an outpost in France. Through a loophole in the sandbags, he checks for enemy movement.
Seconded from the Belgian Army to the Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1917, artist Alfred Bastien was assigned to paint the Royal 22e Régiment (also known as the Royal 22nd Regiment) in 1918. This work is dated 1918, which suggests the soldier depicted is a Canadian with that same regiment.
Pack Mules Going up the Line
Throwing Gernades
Dominion Day, Tinques, 1918
CANADIAN OFFICER KILLED, c. 1918
Canadian Sentry
Snipers, Beaurain-en-Artois
Artillery Horse Killed
Camp at Basseux
Agny, Pas-de-Calais, 1918
Moonlight, Agny
Ruins of Shrine in the Wood, Agny
One of Our Guns Ready, Agny
Cavalry and Tanks at Arras
Dressing Station in the Field, Arras
Canadians Passing in Front of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Bastien traveled to Paris, were he studied the paintings of Courbet and Delacroix. He was also influenced by the Impressionists. Like the Impressionists, he focuses on the affects of light and developed a discrete luminism that characterizes his portraits and landscapes. Bastien taught at the Brussels Academy where he became Director in 1928.
More War Artists by CEFRG
Mary Riter Hamilton
Mary Riter Hamilton produced the largest known collection of Great War art, yet she is still virtually unknown today.
A Y Jackson
In 1915, after the outbreak of the Great War, Private Alexander Young Jackson 457316 enlisted in the 60th Battalion, CEF and sent to Europe. Wounded in the Battle of Sanctuary Wood in June of 1916. While recovering in the hospital in Étaples in northern France, he met Lord Beaverbrook. Soon he was appointed an artist with the Canadian War Records and immediately required to paint a portrait, despite his lack of experience with such themes.
His subsequent works more in keeping with his preference for landscapes. From 1917 to 1919, Lieutenant A Y Jackson worked for the Canadian War Memorials as a war artist.
Major William Orpen
When War commenced in 1914, Orpen raised funds for the War Effort by auctioning blank canvases on which the purchaser’s portrait would be painted.
In 1915, commissioned into the Army Service Corps and carried out routine administration work at Kensington Barracks.
Private Reuben Alvin Jukes
Pte Reuben Alvin Jucksch (Jukes) born on 5 July 1887 to Ernst August Jucksch and Maria Kalbfleisch of Hanover, Ontario.
‘Jukes’ not an official war artist, but family tradition holds that his commanding officer turned a blind eye when Jukes painted the scenes that confronted him whilst on active service.
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