George Biddle, Field Operation

In 1943, Biddle was appointed chairman of the US War Department’s Art Advisory Committee. He was responsible for selecting nearly eighty artists to travel with Army troops on battlefields across the globe to document the experience of World War II in works of art. Biddle himself became a war correspondent and spent six months in Tunisia and Italy with American servicemen. His drawings include portraits of military leaders and rank-and-file soldiers, landscapes of rolling Italian hills that had become theaters of war, and the suffering of civilians.

He published his drawings and watercolors in George Biddle’s War Drawings as well as his journals and drawings in Artist at War. Drawings also appeared in “Report from the Italian Front” in Life magazine on January 3, 1944.