Menin Gate at Midnight Menin Gate at Midnight Menin Gate at Midnight (also known as Ghosts of Menin Gate) is a 1927 painting by Australian artist Will Longstaff. The painting depicts a host of ghostly soldiers marching across a field in front of the Menin Gate war memorial. The painting is part of the collection of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Longstaff painted the work after attending the unveiling of the Menin Gate memorial, at Ypres in Belgium, on 24 July 1927. The memorial commemorated those men of the British Empire, including Australia, who died in the battles of the First World War
Commonwealth War Graves Commission structures. Reginald Blomfield's Menin Gate was the first memorial to the missing located in Europe to be completed, and was unveiled on 24 July 1927. The Menin Gate (Menenpoort) was found to have insufficient space to contain all the names as originally planned and 34,984 names of the missing were instead inscribed on Herbert Baker's Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. Other memorials followed: the Helles Memorial in Gallipoli designed by John James Burnet; the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme and the Arras Memorial designed by Edwin Lutyens; and the Basra Memorial in Iraq designed by Edward Prioleau Warren. The