In 1919, Sargent exhibited a large painting at the Royal Academy of Art in London called Gassed. The Dressing Station at Le Bac and on the Doullers-Arras Road. The British War Memorial Committee had commissioned the work from him as a way of honoring the sacrifices of World War I. The subject was based on a scene the artist actually witnessed during his visit to battlefields in France in 1918. This drawing is a study for one of the soldiers in the painting, which now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London.