Opening November 20, 2025
In 1942, Lieutenant Mitchell Jamieson was commissioned to be one of eight U.S. Naval combat artists charged with creating a visual record of World War II. For the next three years, Jamieson drew and painted all aspects of warfare in both the European and Pacific Theaters, ranging from refugee camps, battlegrounds, and burning villages, to portraits of American soldiers in the tense, quiet days before the fighting began. In dozens of battered, water-stained sketchbooks, he captured the lived experience of combat from his vantage point as an artist and soldier.
After participating in the pivotal invasion of Sicily, Jamieson was one of only two Naval combat artists sent to Normandy for the D-Day invasion. On June 6, 1944, he stood on a combat-loaded LST (Landing Ship, Tank) with hundreds of other soldiers waiting to join the assault waves and demolition parties heading to Utah Beach. He spent the next week living in a foxhole, chronicling with pen and brush the largest seaborne invasion in history. Later he accompanied Allied troops as they moved onward to Cherbourg and Brest, documenting both the liberation they achieved and the destruction they left in their wake.
This exhibition brings together drawings and paintings from Jamieson’s D-Day sketchbooks, many of which are on view for the first time. From the unsettling days preparing for battle aboard the LST, through the Allied landings at Utah, Omaha, and Juno Beaches and the advance into the hedgerows near Cherbourg, to the makeshift burial grounds, returning wounded, and widespread wreckage, it traces D-Day from preparation to aftermath. Together, these works offer a rare and intimate window into one of the most consequential events of modern history.
Jamieson’s life was indelibly marked by his experiences on D-Day. In describing that fateful morning, he wrote, “For so many of us the longest day in history dawned, cheerless and cold, off the coast of Normandy.” His artworks are a testament to the significance of that day and a memorial to the thousands whose lives were cut short on those beaches, and who remain there still.
This exhibition is organized by The Army and Navy Club Library Trust in collaboration with the Jamieson family and estate, with additional loans from the Middendorf Collection.