4th Stage: Bargaining

Miller Gore Brittain was a war veteran at World War Two as a bomb-aimer, flying 37 operational missions before becoming an official war artist in 1945. Having already lived through the Great Depression, he created important documentary work depicting the day-to-day suffering of the working class before turning his attention to capturing the experience of war. Not grand battle scenes, but the faces and humanity of fellow soldiers caught in the violence.

After the war, he explored biblical themes and entered what seemed a promising period of healing, especially after marrying Constance Mary Starr in 1952. For seven years, there was hope, a mid-career flourishing, a path toward recovery. Then, in 1959, his wife passed away from cancer. Brittain never recovered. Four years later, he painted this haunting portrait. A figure stares blankly at the viewer with hollow black eyes that haven’t known sleep in days. The face is gaunt, almost spectral, rendered in bruised blues that suggest both coldness and the discolouration of grief. The eyes of someone lost in rumination, cycling endlessly through what-ifs and I-could-haves, bargaining with a future that will never arrive—the false guilt that haunts those left behind.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” In Brittain’s Female Head, we see both the artist staring into the void of his loss, and the void staring back through those hollow, sleepless eyes, reflecting a grief that has become its own presence. He would pass away five years later, at age 56, never having emerged from that abyss.