Help For Heroes: The White Comrade - Chorley's, Prinknash

Monday 8th February 2010

The White Comrade, a painting of a wounded World War I soldier, is in Chorley’s sale at Prinknash on February 25.

The proceeds of the sale of the lot – estimated at £7,000 to £10,000 – is going to Help The Heroes which does much to rehabilitate the wounded servicemen of Iraq and Afghanistan today.

The painting was donated by a Cheltenham couple, Roy and Dorothy Faier, who bought it from a redundant church in Windsor.

It’s by George Hillyard Swinstead (1860-1926), a prominent Victorian genre painter, and stems from a visit he made to Maudsley Hospital in London in the Great War. Swinstead was tapping into the various legends of ghostly or heavenly figures being seen on the battlefield, the most famous of which was the Angel of Mons, first sighted in a short story in a newspaper in September 1914.

It was meant as fiction but the way in which it comforted the bereaved prompted large numbers of people to want to believe it.