Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, photographers and the like that produced them.
Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of James Arthur Pownall
Not much is known of James Arthur Pownall, coming from the landed gentry and born in to a family of cotton merchants. Pownall apparently eschewed work in the cotton concern to take up painting full time.
Soon afterward, starting around 1882, his work chronicling British and Indian military units began to circulate and continued to do so until the early 1930s.
A Mounted Sowar in Drab Full Dress, Guides Cavalry, James Arthur Pownall, 1902, National Army Museum. Note the Martini rifle while the rest of the empire was going Lee-Metford. The Corps of Guides was raised in 1846/1847 by Lieutenant (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Harry Lumsden (1821–1896). In 1886, as part of the later nineteenth-century reform of the Indian Army, the Guides were transferred from the control of the Governor of the Punjab to that of the Commander-in-Chief. The cavalry regiment was later numbered 10th in the 1922 reorganization of the Indian Army.
Bringing Up the Guns, James Arthur Pownall, 1898,Atkinson Art Gallery Collection
Indian Corps of Drums,1918, James Arthur Pownall, Cheshire Military Museum
Mounted Lancer, James Arthur Pownall, 1918, Cheshire Military Museum
On exhibit extensively in the UK, a number of his pieces have also passed into private collections in recent years and has appeared in a number of books about the Indian Army (Soldiers of the Raj: The Indian Army 1600-1947, et. al)
Thank you for your work, sir.
