The present work depicts members of the Royal Scots returning from the front after the opening days of the First Battle of the Somme. Dated on the front and further inscribed on the reverse “Retour du combat / 1st, 2 et 3 juillet 1916 / Écossais,” the watercolour refers directly to the first three days of the Battle of Albert (1–3 July 1916), during which several Royal Scots battalions endured some of the heaviest fighting and losses of the British Army’s catastrophic opening offensive.
This composition belongs to François Flameng’s extraordinary body of wartime work. Before 1914, Flameng (1856–1923) was celebrated as a leading portraitist and painter of historical subjects, as well as a close friend and travelling companion of Gérôme, Clairin, Helleu, and John Singer Sargent.
With the outbreak of the Great War, he became one of the first artists to join the Peintre des Armées mission, going straight to the Aisne Front in 1914. Unlike many official artists who sketched in the field and completed their canvases after the war, Flameng painted during the conflict itself, often finishing works immediately and dispatching them to Paris for exhibition at the Hôtel des Invalides. Because these shows were mounted continuously, his paintings created a real-time visual chronicle of the war.
The inscription “1st, 2 et 3 juillet 1916 / Écossais” anchors the present watercolour in the most tragic phase of the Somme’s opening. On 1 July, the British Army suffered the worst single day in its history; the 15th and 16th Royal Scots of the 34th Division were among the leading assault battalions, advancing toward the fortified German positions around Fricourt and Contal maison under relentless machine-gun fire. Survivors, joined by the 11th and 12th Battalions on the following days, withdrew exhausted from the shattered front lines on 1–3 July precisely the moment depicted here.
Flameng’s choice to record this scene is characteristic of his approach: unembellished, immediate, and grounded in observation rather than heroising drama. His contemporaries sometimes criticised his work for being “too real”, but this unvarnished authenticity eventually contributed to his recognition. During the war he was appointed honorary president of the Society of Military Painters and accredited by the Ministry of War as an official documenter. In 1920 he was named a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and he donated most of his wartime oeuvre to the Musée de l’Armée, making this work an extremely rare example on the art market.
This watercolour is more than a regimental image: it is a rare, firsthand visual testimony. Flameng captures the human aftermath of the Somme’s opening days - the silent, weary return of Scotland’s oldest regiment after an ordeal that would become emblematic of the war’s unprecedented scale of sacrifice. The finished painting, for which the present work is a study, is held by the Musée d’Orsay Paris.
