The Eve of the Battle of the Somme, with its poignant images of doomed youth at rest and play and its unmistakeable Christian references, is the pictorial equivalent of some of the great poems written during the First World War by such young British servicemen as Rupert Brooke and Wildred Owen. In 1915 Gunn enlisted in the Artists Rifles and in 1916 was stationed in northern France, where he briefly had a studio in the barracks. Later he was commissioned into the 10th Battalion of the Scottish Rifles. Two of his brothers were killed in France - Stanley in 1915 and Charles in 1907 - and Gunn himself was gassed. This picture is the only finished canvas known to have survived from Gunn's service in France with the Artist's Rifles. In the Battle of the Somme some twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the first day alone, 1 July 1916. 

Sir Herbert James Gunn RA, 1893-1964

Born in Glasgow, the son of a tailor, Gunn spent a brief period at Glasgow School of Art before enrolling at Edinburgh College of Art in 1910. He spent some time in Paris before returning to settle in Scotland, where he exhibited his first two portraits at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1913. Gunn was a friend and contemporary of the Edinburgh Group painted William Oliphant Hutchison, and his and Hutchison's portraits were recognised as being far superior to those of other portrait painters at this time. Hutchison's diploma picture in the Royal Scottish Academy was a portrait of Gunn.
Although Gunn's reputation was to be made as a portrait painter, his early success came with fluently painted landscapes executed in France and Spain before the First World War. After his demobilisation Gunn settled in England, although he maintained strong links with his native Glasgow. His career as a society portrait painter took off, and in 1953 he was commissioned to paint the Queen at the beginning of her reign.