Duty over conscience was the choice that sparked a nightmare for today’s world.
Betrayer and betrayed, the two men are side by side, reunited for the first time in close to a century.
It is, perhaps, fanciful to read too much into the eyes of men that have been rendered by a few brush strokes, no matter how accomplished the artist, but gazing into the faces of T E Lawrence and Emir Feisal, captured in two portraits made in Paris in 1919 by the British artist Augustus John, it is possible to see reflected in them the tragic story of an Arabian dream that became the nightmare the world faces today.
Feisal and Lawrence were in Paris for the 1919 peace conference, at which the spoils of the Ottoman Empire, defeated in the First World War with its ally Germany, were carved up between the victorious French and British.
John, an official war artist, was staying at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, home to the British delegation during the conference, and seized the opportunity to paint Lawrence and Feisal.
The two canvases form the centrepieces of Artist and Empire, a major new exhibition that opened on Sunday at Tate Britain in London. Subtitled “Facing Britain’s Imperial Past”, the provocative collection of 200 works traces the global effect of the empire from the 16th century to today.
Many of the images have resonance for the modern world.
“People who come to this exhibition will doubtless read from the past to the present,” says curator Alison Smith.
Much of the work portrays “the aftershocks of empire being played out at various points in history, and particularly in the present day, so the timing of this exhibition is very relevant”.
Elizabeth Thompson’s powerful 1879 painting Remnants of an Army shows the badly wounded sole survivor of a British army massacred during the First Anglo-Afghan War as he reaches the safety of Jalalabad.
A small statue of Maj Gen Charles Gordon, killed and decapitated in Khartoum by followers of the Mahdi in 1885, is another reminder of the folly of imperial adventure.
However, the timeliness of the exhibition is rooted most firmly in the events of 1916 to 1919, three years that shaped the Middle East and lay the foundations for the violent tragedy unfolding across the region today.
The artist had a front-row seat as history unfolded.
In Feisal’s distracted, solemn-faced demeanour can be imagined the dawning realisation that his vision of a pan-Arab state, cynically encouraged by the British to bring the Arabs of the Hejaz into the war against the Turks, had been nothing but a cruel illusion.
Lawrence, dressed in the robes of the desert warrior he had been for two bloody years, stares directly at the viewer, projecting his carefully cultivated persona as the saviour of the Arabs.
But the image, like Britain’s alliance with the Arabs, was a lie. Lawrence was already well aware that he had betrayed the man who had trusted him as a friend on the campaign trail from the Hejaz to ultimate victory in Damascus.
It was while in Paris in 1919 that Lawrence began the first draft of his account of his part in the Arab Revolt that would be published in 1922 as the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and it is clear that he was already racked by shame for his part in Britain’s manipulation.
The purpose of the book, he wrote, was to show the world “how natural and inevitable” the Arab victory had been, and “how little dependent on the outside assistance of the few British”.
It was “an Arab war waged and led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia”.
But that aim would never be achieved, thanks to the perfidy of the British, who during the war struck a secret deal with France over the future of the Ottoman lands. It was a deal with which Lawrence was familiar, even as he urged the Arabs to risk all against the Turks.
“I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give 20 million the foundations on which to build an inspired dream palace of their national thoughts,” he wrote.
Lawrence had sour words for the ambitions of the British, which in Mesopotamia foreshadowed the motivation for later western incursions into the area.
After the humiliating defeat of the Anglo-Indian garrison by Ottoman forces at Kut Al Amara in 1916, he vented despair at his country’s sacrifice of its own “young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness”.
He wrote, “we were casting them by thousands into the fire, not to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours”.
After Kut, to which Lawrence the intelligence officer was sent to offer the Turks £2 million (Dh11m) – a fortune in 1916 – in a vain attempt to secure the release of the doomed force, he returned to Cairo. From there he joined Feisal in the Hejaz as the British army’s liaison officer and began his two-faced game.
“The cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by promises of self-government afterwards,” he wrote. Arabs believed “in persons, not in institutions” and demanded from Lawrence endorsement of his government’s promises.
“So I had to join the conspiracy and assured the men of their reward.”
In the portrait captured at the peace conference in 1919, Lawrence does his best to convey the image he had created for himself, says Ms Smith.
“Feisal looks away from the artist and, by implication, the viewer, whereas Lawrence looks directly at you with his magnetic blue eyes.”
In Lawrence’s portrait, “there is a strong emphasis on self-fashioning and performance”, with which the artist conspires. Gone is the wrist watch seen in most photographs of Lawrence in his Arab dress, and prominent is the dagger given to him by Feisal.
Lawrence, Ms Smith says, “is posing”, literally and figuratively, and “it is a false role. At the same time as he is setting himself up as a saviour of the Arabs, he is part of the betrayal of them, too”.
In photos at the peace conference Lawrence, standing uncertainly behind Feisal’s shoulder, strikes a less impressive, somewhat diminished figure.
Away from the canvas he wore his British army colonel’s uniform, but topped with a kaffiyeh and agal, “a sartorial compromise that reflects his somewhat awkward role as intermediary between the Hejaz Arabs and the European statesmen”.
One can only wonder what passed between Feisal and Lawrence during the conference.
In his diary, John noted that Lawrence “often accompanied the Emir Feisal, whom I painted more than once”, but unfortunately “the two would converse in Arabic while I worked. Sometimes, that remarkable woman, Gertrude Bell, would join in”.
Bell, a British classicist and sometime spy who had travelled extensively in Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia before the war, would play a key part as a policymaker in creating the states of Jordan and Iraq.
It is unlikely that Lawrence discussed his disillusionment with her but it was given free rein in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
“In our two years’ partnership under fire [the Arabs] grew accustomed to believing me and to think my government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but of course instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed.”
It was, he admitted, “evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff”.
Denied his dream of a pan-Arab state, Feisal was handed the consolation prize of the throne of the newly minted Arab Kingdom of Syria. Crowned in March 1920, he was kicked out in July by the French, who in April had been given the mandate for Syria at the San Remo conference of the victorious wartime allies.
At the subsequent Cairo conference in March 1921, lobbying by Lawrence and Bell led to Feisal being installed as king of the new Kingdom of Iraq. Feisal had never been to Iraq but he won over its people and his undignified game of musical thrones was at an end.
He did well at the job until his untimely death, from a supposed heart attack, in September 1933 at the age of 48. Lawrence survived him by only 18 months.
After Paris and the war, Lawrence, who had once courted publicity so flamboyantly, sought obscurity. First he adopted a pseudonym and enlisted as a technician in the Royal Air Force.
Exposed, he joined the Royal Tank Corps only to return again to the RAF in 1925, where he served in relative obscurity for a decade.
He left the service in March 1935 and was killed two months later, aged 46, in a motorcycle accident.
Hanging in the Tate, captured at the moment of their disillusionment, Feisal and Lawrence already have the air of men whose race has been run.
For the Middle East they left behind in 1919, the tragedy and turmoil that blights the region today was only just beginning.
Artist and Empire is at Tate Britain, London, until April 10.
