The Art of Remembrance (from The Last Post to The Monuments Men)

Video from Christian Art

The Art of Remembrance (from The Last Post to The Monuments Men)

"Fr. Patrick visits Brookwood War Cemetery to reflect on remembrance, The Poppy, lost art, and the haunting beauty of The Last Post.

Fr. Patrick van der Vorst, founder of ‪@christianart‬ visits Brookwood War Cemetery in Surrey, UK — one of Europe’s largest burial grounds — to reflect on how art, music, and faith help us remember the fallen.

Among the quiet ranks of headstones, he traces the origins of Remembrance: from the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to the birth of the Red Poppy as a symbol of sacrifice and hope. The poppy’s delicate stem and scattered seeds become an image of both human fragility and renewal — life rising again from loss.

Fr. Patrick explores how war scarred not only lives but culture itself — destroying churches, monuments, and masterpieces — and how artists, curators, and soldiers, the Monuments Men, risked everything to preserve beauty amidst chaos. In John Singer Sargent’s haunting painting Gassed, he finds not triumph but compassion — a modern Via Dolorosa that reveals humanity’s endurance and the faint light of hope even in devastation.

The film concludes with one of the most moving artworks of all: not painted, but played — The Last Post. A single bugle call that speaks through silence, its pauses carrying the weight of memory, prayer, and gratitude.

Standing among the fallen, Fr. Patrick reminds us that remembrance is more than history — it is a call to guard peace, cherish beauty, and let silence itself become our act of devotion." from the video introduction

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