The grisliest images are the earliest: Bearing Witness? Violence and Trauma on Paper, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, reviewed

‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media images to shock the public were engravings documenting contemporary social ills pioneered by the Victorian magazine The Graphic, though the association goes a long way further back, to Jacques Callot’s etching series ‘Miseries of War’ (1633) recording atrocities perpetrated by both sides during the French invasion of his native Lorraine in the Thirty Years’ War.

The grisliest of those images, ‘The Hangman’s Tree’, is the earliest work in Bearing Witness? Violence and Trauma on Paper, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The prints and drawings on display are not all about war – social deprivation is the subject of Käthe Kollwitz’s 1922 sheet of drawings of German children, racial oppression the target of South African printmaker Ndabenhle William Zulu’s 1992 linocut ‘Peace Now!’ – but the role of the artist as witness is most neatly encapsulated in the title of Goya’s etching, ‘I Saw This’ (c.1810-11),