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In 1890, the American impressionist painter Robert John Vonnoh painted his most well known work In Flanders Fields (also known as Where Soldiers Sleep and Poppies Grow or Coquelicots).

Expressive brushstrokes evoke the fiery red of the poppies, a subject matter that was popular at the time among painters. Joseph G Butler purchased the painting in 1919, and it is now in the permanent collection of The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

When Vonnoh painted this he could not have imagined that in 1914 the Great War would break out in Europe, and the red poppy become a symbol of the battlefield deaths.

That it did is due to a Canadian medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. He was to conduct the funeral service for a friend who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. In a cemetery nearby red poppies blew gently in the breeze. McCrae scribbled the poem In Flanders Fields in his notebook and read it at the funeral. He threw it away after, but a fellow officer rescued it and sent it to the English magazine Punch and published in 1915.

Many were moved by the pathos of the poem, among them Moina Michael who worked In a YMCA canteen in New York. She set out to have the red poppy adopted in the US as a national symbol of remembrance. The American Legion adopted it in September 1920 at their convention. Madame E. Guerin joined forces with Moina Michael and together they were responsible for the poppy becoming an international symbol of remembrance.

The first poppies were made of cloth, produced in France, and first launched in NZ the day before Anzac Day 1922. Today the Christchurch RSA is responsible for making the poppies, now made from paper.

The Flanders poppy still symbolizes remembrance at all major commemorative events; at military funerals, and at war graves and cemeteries in New Zealand and around the world.

McCrae did not live to see his poem and the poppy become synonymous with remembrance. Vonnoh, the artist of the painting, did.

The First World War was a brutal war that changed the face of Europe until the next world war, when it all changed again. War goes on, the world continues to change. Nothing remains the same, apart from the red Flanders poppy, the symbol of remembrance for all those who have given their lives in service to their country.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row by row

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

On Anzac Day, may we always remember those who have fallen.