Charcoal, 20 by 13.5 cm

Provenance: the artist’s family

Luard was enlisted in the British Army Service Corps in 1914 and saw active service throughout the First World War where he was awarded both the DSO and the Croix de Guerre. Despite this was able to find time to execute a remarkable corpus of (mainly) charcoal drawings including many of working horses (the subject for which he is best known today) pulling heavy guns in the mud of the Western Front. These penetrating self portrait sketches come from the same group of work.