#war

This shows Czech Legion troops marching into Vladivostok in 1918, deep in the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Luks was usually known for gritty city scenes, not history painting on this scale.

It's for three men who were shot in the dunes at Waalsdorpervlakte in March 1945, a couple of months before it was all over. They say it went up two years after that, in the stretch when towns across the country were commissioning memorials about as fast as anyone could carve them.

The plaque reads 'Rückkehr in die Heimat' — return to the homeland. From what I can find it's a memorial to the prisoners of war who made it back after the Second World War, put up decades after the fact. Beyond that, the internet gave me almost nothing.

The government reportedly bought this almost right away, then kept it out of public view for years — a painting cheering on revolution apparently made the people now in charge nervous.

A village war memorial from a few years after the occupation ended, with the local dead listed alongside. I couldn't find who pushed for it or how it got paid for. Plenty of Dutch towns raised theirs by public collection in those years, but I don't know that this one was.

It was made to order, from what I've read — he put the idea to the new government himself once the French had been pushed back out of Madrid, and got it paid for. There's a companion picture the same size showing the day before, when the fighting started.

It was painted the year Paris fell to the Prussians, and from what I've read it's one of a small set he made about that war — the smoking city in the background is meant to be Paris itself. Why there's a sphinx in the middle of it, no one seems to agree; even the title just shrugs.