ANZAC Day 2019

In her life, English writer and sculptor Clare
Sheridan challenged convention and crossed many
social boundaries. In her art, she also bridged
ideologies; she sketched Mussolini, and sculpted
busts of Gandhi, Lenin, Trotzky, as well as her
cousin Sir Winston Churchill, whose politics she had
come to appreciate just as he respected her
creativity: Yes my dear, we had to fight those Nazis
it would have been too terrible had we failed. But in
the end you have your art. The Empire I believed in
has gone.
Woman leading blind soldier was commissioned by
the National War Museum in London, where a
special sub-committee was set up to collect and
display items pertaining to the women’s war effort.
Sheridan made this second cast and gave it to the
model, Trooper Ernest Charles Matheson, an
Australian who served with the 9 th Light Horse in
Gallipoli and convalescent at St Dunstan’s Hospital
for the Blind during 1915-17, where Sheridan met
him. (ART19568)