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Wednesday, 8 March 2017

British soldier paints watercolors of Egypt during WWI

A British soldier hailing from Plymouth documented his time in Egypt during World War I through a collection of bright watercolor paintings, which were unearthed along with his diary from the war. Wilfred Owen Reynolds first arrived in Alexandria in 1915, and seems to have stayed in Egypt well into 1918, Jon Bailey writes for the Plymouth Herald. “In one [journal] entry he talks about the highly-coloured wares for sale, men wearing fez hats, veiled women skillfully carrying heavy loads on their heads and people engaged in crafts on the pavements outside their shops … in other entries he also describes the heat [and] the donkeys.” Sounds about right.

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