During the First World War official and unofficial New Zealand war artists produced a wide range of works depicting this country's war effort. These works later became part of New Zealand's National Collection of War Art.
New Zealand soldiers used art to interpret the experience of the war for an audience of noncombatant civilians. Civilian artists in turn produced works that responded to and explored the public’s perception of the war.
The NZEF employed its first official war artist, Lance Corporal Nugent Welch, in April 1918. Welch documented the activities of the New Zealand Division in France and Belgium, while other soldier-artists were seconded to record New Zealand’s war effort in England and the Middle East.
Following the end of the war, attention turned to where New Zealand's official First World War art collection would be stored. Plans for a National War Memorial Museum in Wellington were never completed, leaving the collection in limbo for the next thirty years
There are around 1500 paintings, drawings, sketches, cartoons and prints in New Zealand’s National Collection of War Art. This collection has its origins in the final year of the First World War
George Edmund Butler became New Zealand’s second official war artist in August 1918 – as it turned out, just three months before the end of the war. There are almost 100 of his works in New Zealand's National Collection of War Art, making him this country's most prolific First World War artist
Cartoon drawn by Ernest Herber Thompson for his 1918 publication Light Diet: 150 Caricatures and Sketches Perpetrated by a New Zealand Artist in and out of Hospital.
