'Rocket-Firing Typhoons' - today

Yes - the RAF Museum have a radial-engined one but the only Sabre-engined version is the one at Booker. There are of course plenty of Sea Furies around but they are a much later story......

 

A few years ago, I bought a print of Wootton's painting and noticed something very interesting. It is dated "18-8-1944". Although there is no doubt the scene is of the southern edge of St. Lambert, there is no way that Wootton was there on that date. The northern half of the village was first captured by Major Currie and his small force on August 19. I read somewhere that Wootton arrived in St. Lambert on August 22 or 23, after the battle was over. It appears that the painting is a retrospective, and portrays what was happening there on August 18.

I also read that Wootton's commanding officer came over while he was painting and his only comment was, "Not enough dead Germans." That, too, is consistent with this painting being a retrospective. The field on the right side of the painting was, after the battle, the site of what General Eisenhower described in his memoirs as a scene from Dante: "It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but
dead and decaying flesh." That was the aftermath of three days of desperate German attacks on the village from August 19 to 21. My father describes this field in much the same way; by the end of the battle, one could walk across it without touching the ground. Wootton's painting shows the site before it got to that awful state.

 

You're quite right.....I think that Wootton meant his painting to represent the scene as it may have appeared on the 18th.
In his book, 'Frank Wootton - 50 Years Of Aviation Art' he describes visiting the battlefield 'before the smoke of battle had died down' with a number of Typhoon pilots who had been operating in the Falaise Gap. As he says in the book 'I had to omit a great deal of the unpaintable'.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that author Didier Lodieu has recently identified the most prominent Panther in the painting ( not visible in the detail above ), #445, as being from 1./Pz.Rgt. 24 of the 116 'Greyhound' Panzer Division which is a correct detail - they lost several Panthers in the area.