A single diplomat’s collection of around 3,600 French wartime prints, donated to the Imperial War Museums in the 1950s, has never been systematically studied—this PhD project will finally do so. The project addresses a gap in both art history and the cultural history of the First World War. Scholars have largely ignored lithography as a medium, and the specific conditions under which artists produced propaganda during the conflict remain underexplored. By examining the Bute Collection alongside British government-commissioned prints, the research will map how nationalist and imperialist messages were crafted through a violent, physical printmaking process—breaking stone, etching with acid, forcing ink under pressure. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven research. It does not promise a practical application. However, it challenges the assumption that wartime propaganda was simply a top-down command. By showing how artists worked at the intersection of politics, commerce, and art, the project could reshape how historians and museums understand the visual language of patriotism and imperialism. Future exhibitions or digital archives of the collection may also benefit from a clearer scholarly context.
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This PhD project will explore the role and significance of lithographs and other printed images produced in support of the war effort between 1914 and 1918. To do so, it will investigate the Bute Collection – a fascinating but under-researched collection of European fine and popular lithographs held by the Imperial War Museums (IWM). The collection was gathered by John Crichton-Stewart, the 4th Marquess of Bute, when he was a diplomat in Paris during the First World War and donated to the museum in the early 1950s. It contains around 3,600 predominantly French prints, representing all aspects of French patriotic print production of the period. It is envisaged that the PhD project will focus on this collection, as well as the museum’s collection of British lithographs of the period, mainly instigated by the government’s War Propaganda Bureau / Department of Information. The proposed investigation of the Bute collection will fill in a curiously outstanding gap in the field. Both scholars of France and art historians have paid relatively little attention to lithography. Moreover, in both Britain and France, the cultural history of the conflict has often underplayed the specificities of artistic production of wartime. This doctoral project therefore represents a genuine opportunity to make a significant contribution to the field by scrutinising the lithographs of the First World War in their own terms and helping to contextualise the Bute collection within the wider art collection at IWM. It would position them in their context of production (commission, design, printmaking) and explore their dissemination and reception at all relevant levels (domestic, local, national, transnational). The project will allow the researcher to map the extent and nuances of nationalist and imperialist war propaganda present in artists’ lithography in order to produce a transnational study of lithographs of the First World War. It will explore the lithograph as a form of artistic expression on the subject of the war and examine the artists’ circumstances, contexts, preoccupations and motivations, showing how lithographic artists worked at the juncture of politics, commerce and art. The project will help to develop a pluralistic approach to wartime propaganda by looking at the production and function of artistic lithography during the war. Such necessarily collaborative visual products challenge the notion of propaganda as an inherently top-down form of communication. The project will consider and rethink the complex varieties of patriotism and imperialism by examining the sophisticated visual language that artists employed to appeal to different audiences and agendas. The project will also look at the process of lithography, a mode of printmaking that is fundamentally violent, involving breaking and grinding stones, etching surfaces with corrosive acid, and forcing ink through a mechanical press at great pressure. The method’s impact on the final image would be an intriguing lens with which to view lithography’s function as a tool of wartime communication. The appointed student will engage closely with IWM’s First World War team and with the museum art curators as appropriate.
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