IWM holds a fascinating but under-researched collection of European fine and popular prints 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, most of them lithographs, as well as relief and intaglio prints, and some drawings. 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. These include the 1917 series Britain’s Efforts and Ideals by various artists and the work of soldier-artist Gerald Spencer Pryse.

The proposed investigation of these collections 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 in wartime.