MODERNIZING TRADITIONS

Great Britain and Ireland lost over 750,000 soldiers in World War I.

- JOHN O'HERN

The futurist H.G. Wells wrote an article in 1914 titled “The War That Will End War,” a phrase that is now considered paradoxical. When I first went to England, the sculptures on World War I memorials struck me. The figures seemed to represent real people. And, they were young. About 250,000 of Britain’s soldiers in the war were under 18. George V was king, having succeeded his father, Edward VII, in 1910. Edward’s reign was known as the Edwardian Era, familiar to everyone who watched Downtown Abbey.

One hundred years after the fact, this country will soon have a National WWI Memorial with an extraordinary bronze relief by Sabin Howard, composed of 38 figures, each readable as an individual with a personal story within the overall depiction of A Soldier’s Journey.

The idealism of the prewar period didn’t die in the war or in succeeding wars and even some of the high fashion and style crops up from time to time. Edwardian period beards are familiar from period portraits by John Singer Sargent and in almost any town in America today.

Ben Lupkin works in his family’s stained glass studio in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He sports an Edwardian beard and moustache in a profile portrait captured by his brother, painter Peter Lupkin. Profile portraits can be found on ancient coins and were popular on medallions and in paintings of the Italian Quattrocento (1400-1499).

Ben can be distinguished from his Edwardian peers by his 21st-century baseball cap and pocket tee. He gazes at a higher light, inspired perhaps as his father was when he saw a stained-glass window of St. George and the Dragon, which later inspired him to become an artist.