The stairway, Péronne

As the Allies closed in on victory in late 1918, Arthur Streeton requested and was granted a second deployment to the Western Front between mid October and late November 1918. While touring the partially destroyed town of Péronne, which had been captured by Australian battalions in September, Streeton produced a striking series of pencil and watercolour drawings. These rapidly executed works, which present abstracted views of buildings damaged by intense gunfire and shelling, are surprisingly modern in their simplicity and starkness.

Streeton wrote to his wife Nora: 'I'm getting some watercolours of ruins, in some ways much more striking than the ones I did before - they are bolder & I think more decorative. Heavens how one realizes things here in these fresh ruins ... I'm getting good things'.