Infantry, Near Nijmegen, Holland, 1946

Colville produced his early work as an official war artist in the Second World War, and this painting foreshadows many of his later concerns. The composition reflects his geometric obsessions: a series of plodding figures—Canadian soldiers—recede into the background, their collective weight seeming to push the figure in the foreground out into our view. The painting also contains the seeds of Colville’s concern with the place of humans in a shattered world, set in motion by the orders of others but sustained only through their own individual agency.