george butler

Sunken road near Solesmes by George Edmund Butler, October 1918.

Butte de Polygon by George Edmund Butler, 1920.

Butler commemorated the New Zealand soldiers who died in the First World War in the Butte de Polygon: Thy Father and I have sought thee sorrowing, Luke II 48 (1920). Intended for a New Zealand War Memorial Museum, this painting was also meant to offer spiritual consolation to those families who had lost their sons on the Western Front.

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

Artist George Edmund Butler alongside one of his paintings, circa 1932.

George 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.

• Read a biography of George Butler

Capture of the walls of Le Quesnoy by George Edmund Butler, 1920.

George Edmund Butler's painting Zonnebeke (completed about 1918) captures the devastated Belgian landscape in the aftermath of the great battles of 1917. Zonnebeke is just to the south-west of Passchendaele, where the New Zealanders fought in October 1917, and just north of Polderhoek, where they saw action two months later.

George Edmund Butler's ghostly painting of the shattered ruins of The cloth hall, Ypres (1919) captures the devastating impact of the First World War on Belgium's urban and rural landscape.