© Peter Howson estate

Howson’s Holocaust Crowd Scene graphically depicts the horror and brutality of the Nazi concentration camps with the crowd of Jewish prisoners, stripped of their own clothing and dressed in striped camp uniforms, depicted in attitudes of grief, suffering and lamentation. They are flanked by two thuggish Nazi guards wearing swastika armbands, one making a Nazi salute and the other pointing inward to focus attention on a prisoner prominently displaying the yellow badge with the Star of David that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe, used here symbolically to indicate martyrdom. Both the structure and composition of the painting draw on classical themes and Christian imagery, with the naked child held aloft recalling Rubens 'Massacre of the Innocents' and the draped dead body to the lower left of the composition with a mourning figure draped over it suggesting the dead Christ or pietà. The mood of mourning also recalls British-Jewish artist Morris Kestelman’s 1943 painting Lama Sabachthani (Why have you forsaken me?) (Imperial War Museum), made in response to reports of the Holocaust in Britain.