Westminster from a Savoy window

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 drypoint combination dating from the mid-1920s - and landscapes.

This is a winter view of the River Thames looking south west from an upper window at Savoy Hotel and is a spin-off from Nevinson's oil painting of the same scene, usually called <em>Victoria Embankment</em> (1924; Museum of London). In the foreground is Cleopatra's Needle. On the right are Victoria Embankment Gardens. Beyond, trains cross Charing Cross Railway Bridge, and the silhouettes of Westminster Bridge, Houses of Parliament & Whitehall Court are visible in the background. Objects do not disappear behind the fog as they did in Claude Monet's turn-of-the-century equivalents, but are more substantial, rather beautifully conveying the polluted haze of the London air. Note too the trains puffing out white smoke as they go across Hungerford Bridge. Te Papa owns another related, still more spectacular, Thames-side/London fog print by Nevinson, <em>From Waterloo Bridge: Sun bursting through fog, </em>1924-27 (1964-0001-30).

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