From Waterloo Bridge: Sun bursting through fog

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946), was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I.

Nevinson studied at the Slade School of Art  under Henry Tonks and alongside Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler. When he left the Slade, Nevinson befriended Filippo Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, and the radical writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, who founded the short-lived Rebel Art Centre. However, Nevinson fell out with Lewis and the other 'rebel' artists when he attached their names to the Futurist movement. Lewis immediately founded the Vorticists, an avant garde group of artists and writers from which Nevinson was excluded.

At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French and British soldiers. For a very brief period he served as a volunteer ambulance driver before ill-health forced his return to Britain. Subsequently, Nevinson volunteered for home service with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He used these experiences as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used the machine aesthetic of Futurism and the influence of Cubism to great effect. His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote at the time that Nevinson's painting La Mitrailleuse, 'will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.' In 1917, Nevinson was appointed an official war artist, but he was no longer finding Modernist styles adequate for describing the horrors of modern war, and he increasingly painted in a more realistic manner. Nevinson's later World War 1 paintings, based on short visits to the Western Front, are considered by some art historians as lacking the same powerful effect as those earlier works which had helped to make him one of the most famous young artists working in England.

Although his post-war work continued in a quieter, more naturalistic mode, Nevinson won justified praise for his cityscapes of London, Paris and New York - such as this etching and aquatint combination dating from the mid-1920s - and landscapes. This ranks as one of Nevinson's most spectacular prints and totally discredits art historians' tendencies to write him off after c. 1917. He achieved the brilliant effect of sunlight bursting through the London fog over the river Thames through the use of aquatint and careful wiping of the plate, as well as drypoint. It is clear that in such a work he was looking back with admiration to the serial paintings of similar subject matter by Claude Monet, dating from the turn-of-the-century and which he had worshipped as a young student before discovering Futurism. Of an Impressionists exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1932, Nevinson asked rhetorically in an article headlined 'Can We Paint Like This Now?'  Te Papa also owns an impression of a related print of the same period, <em>Westminster from a Savoy window </em>(1957-0003-10).

See:

Christine L. Corton, <em>The London Fog: A Biography</em> (Cambridge, Mass., 2015)

Wikipedia, 'Christopher R.W. Nevinson', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._W._Nevinson

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018