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Description: | (Updated, January 2015) One of a group of eleven oil paintings by Eurich, an official war artist, allocated to the National Maritime Museum after the Second World War. The artist claimed to have painted this work following an inaccurate report of the bombardment of Salerno, although he could not write an account of the event for security reasons. He was under the impression that he had been commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to paint a work showing the Allied bombardment ahead of the Salerno landings. However, the only two British capital ships at Salerno were HMS 'Valiant' and 'Warspite' (both of the 'Queen Elizabeth' class) where their effectiveness was a major factor in the Allied landings' success and thus an appropriate subject for a commission. However, while they are therefore by implication the ships represented here, the images in the painting appear to be based on the 'King George V' class of which 'KG V' herself and her sister 'Howe' did, in fact, bombard Trapani (Sicily) and the island of Levanzo on 12 July 1943, just ahead of the Salerno operation. 'Bombardment of the coast near Trapani' is used here as the title, since that is how it has previously appeared in other references. Allowing that Eurich was not supplied with quite the right references to produce an accurate documentary image of Salerno itself, taken in any way it effectively evokes the campaign as a whole and was also more specifically intended by the artist to be an atmospheric response to ships bombarding a Mediterranean shoreline. He wrote later that the point of the design was an, 'attempt to give the explosion quality and rending of the air', and that he had treated the work as a 'dissection of gunfire'.
The scene is shown from an aerial perspective, with the ship to the far left bathed in white light at the bow and firing from the stern, while the ship to the right is dark grey against the pale sea and sky. The smoke and explosions from her firing guns are bright orange in the foreground and as the smoke moves upwards it merges with the sky. The sea is represented as glassy and still, with the reflections of the action clearly visible on it. The town is hinted at on the horizon to the far right, where the grey vertical streaks of the bombs fall.
It will need to be checked for object numbers and its condition activity updated; This object was sighted as being on display during the Collections Inventory Project (2001-2005).
caption: Capital Ships Bombard Salerno | Publisher: | "http://collections.rmg.co.uk/" | Rights holder: | "Royal Museums Greenwich" | Subjects: | H.M.S. Warspite H.M.S. Valiant Second World War paintings | Source: | Royal Museums Greenwich | Identifier: | http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections... | Go to resource |
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