Monuments Men and Martyred Towns: The Arras Belfry by Fernand Sabatté

The Arras Belfry, an oil painting by the French artist Fernand Sabatté, is held at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. It depicts the destruction of the town’s late medieval belfry by German artillery in 1914 and is part of a genre of First World War propaganda imagery known as the “martyred towns” series. This imagery was so popular at the time that when destruction visited Dublin during the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the city became known as “Ypres on the Liffey.” Artist Sabatté was a French army officer based in Arras in Northern France where he was in charge of salvaging artworks from medieval churches and town halls destroyed in the fighting.