Chariots, the earliest military vehicle (apart from the horse), carry Greek and Roman gods and goddesses in Renaissance and baroque paintings, and feature in Alexander von Wagner’s over-the-top Chariot Race of c.1882. In the many paintings of battles from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, more humble vehicles, such as wagons and gun carriages, play a minor and distant part, the emphasis always being on the fighting people and horses.
With the arrival of armoured vehicles in the First World War, tanks and armoured cars played a very prominent role on the front line and feature in the works commissioned by the official war artist schemes of the First and Second World Wars, and later, and also by the many specialist military museums.
