When British soldiers entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 79 years ago today, they were confronted with the horror that the Nazi retreat had left behind.
Inside were tens of thousands of starving prisoners, masses of unburied corpses, the living “mingled in with the dead”.
Eric Taylor, an artist from London, was there to witness the devastation. What he saw went on to inspire a series of paintings of figures and scenes from the camp, nine of which are held in our collection.
The paintings distinguish individuals from the wider horror. Taylor returned to his studio from the front and worked from sketches he’d made, documenting the anguished stares and fragile figures he had encountered.
One painting, A dying Hungarian Pianist includes an inscription, a quote from the subject: “I am glad you are recording what they have done to me”.
The series as a whole evokes the paradox of ‘liberation’. Jews were only in the camps liberated by the Allies because of the death marches that drove them from the east and away from the advancing Red Army. Perhaps a third or more of those in concentration camps by January 1945 were dead by the end of the war. And liberation did not bring reprieve for those too ill or malnourished for freedom to be of any use.
Another painting, A Merciful Death at Belsen Concentration Camp, shows a skeletal figure shrouded in dark cloth. Below the title is a handwritten inscription, “the unbelievable horror of Belsen was beyond human understanding…”. Perhaps what was most incomprehensible were the lives lost even after the arrival of Taylor’s regiment.
Taylor failed to secure a role as an official war artist; indeed, his son has noted the war was a “rude interruption” in his fledgling career as a painter. However, the committee supervising war artists was interested in his work, and after his return from Germany he put a great deal of effort into creating final versions of the drawings he had made.
His son also noted that perhaps due to his position as an ordinary soldier he was in a better position to record the brutality and chaos he witnessed, an experience the artist himself later described as “shattering”.
The paintings in our collection were donated following a retrospective exhibition in Huddersfield. Several of Taylor’s drawings from Belsen, as well as other works, can be found in the University of Leeds’ Special Collections and the Imperial War Museum’s War Artist Archive.
We have recently catalogued our collection of artworks, codifying them as their own important class of sources within the archive. This will allow our artworks to inform future research and be displayed as part of future exhibitions and outreach activities, including a planned exhibition of this series of works to mark the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Belsen next year.
By Samantha Dulieu, Press and Communications Manager
Further reading:
