“The Rape of Peace” from Love Through the Ages for the Tavern Club (fragment)

Edgar Miller
1934
Oil on board
L 1.5, W 1.3 m

For the last panel of the Love Through the Ages mural, Miller painted what is surely his darkest but also most politically charged work, a stand-alone fragment of the mural which came to be known as The Rape of Peace. In Miller’s The Rape of Peace, undoubtedly playing off of the title of the mythological story and often painted Rape of Europa, “Peace” is represented by a nude woman at the center of the image, where she is literally being bound and gagged by a circle of brutes nearly tearing her apart , whose faces are clearly meant to represent the many fascist dictators who had come to power in the world by the 1930s: Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Franco, Mussolini and others. Amidst the struggle, Peace appears to be taking her last gasp of air, while warplanes fly above them, and a dove plucked of all its feathers attempts to escape the scene. Originally and ironically titled Peace and Peace Lovers, Miller’s image was prophetic, as the beginnings and finally the start of the Second World War commenced in full by 1939.