Private Christopher R.W. Nevinson, one of the earliest war artists created images of the Great War that explored the personal and global consequences of war.
The depiction of two dead British soldiers lying face down in the mud,
as well as the loaded title, meant this work not passed for exhibition.
Nevinson displayed it partially obscured with tape bearing the word ‘Censored’.
This gained the publicity he was seeking, though also a reprimand from his employers.
Censors
While one early painting censored for its unflinching portrayal of death, others portrayed close-ups of wounded and worn soldiers; still others were distant landscapes that spoke to the industrial growth of the period and how that changed the face of war.
Early Life of Christopher Nevinson
The artist born in 1889 in London, England. His parents well-known journalists—his father an author and war correspondent, his mother a writer and suffragette.
Unlike many of his peers, Nevinson’s family supported his career choice, and its prominence and contacts proved invaluable. In London he studied at the St. John’s Wood School of Art, the Slade School of Art, and later in Paris at the famed Académie Julian.
The Arrival – My Arrival in Dunkirk
The painting depicts the arrival of a transatlantic ship into a harbour, from different perspectives. The word “transatlantic” and several people are visible. Nevinson’s painting reflects his interest in the Futurist movement. Exhibited in 1915 under the title My Arrival in Dunkirk.
Today in the collection of the Tate Britain in Pimlico, donated by the artist’s widow in 1956.
War Service of Christopher Nevinson
Early in November 1914 until January 1915, he volunteered as an ambulance driver and mechanic, and also found time to paint some stark portrayals of warfare. His father Henry, a war correspondent and campaigner, involved in the creation of The Friends Ambulance Unit.
The Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU) a volunteer ambulance service, founded by individual members of the British Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), in line with their Peace Testimony.
The Doctor
Doctors and medical orderlies hastily treat the injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital. The setting is the ‘Shambles’, a goods yard outside Dunkirk, where Nevinson worked as a Red Cross volunteer tending to wounded soldiers. He described the scene in his autobiography, Paint and Prejudice: Our doctors took charge, and in five minutes I was nurse, water-carrier, stretcher-bearer, driver, and interpreter. Gradually the shed cleansed, disinfected and made inhabitable, and by working all night we managed to dress most of the patient’s wounds.
Nevinson’s first job as a volunteer with the
Red Cross was to tend to the dying men.
Later he recalled the three months he spent transporting the injured, and dressing various wounds in the casualty clearing stations in France. “When a month had passed I felt I had been born in a nightmare.
La Patrie
I had seen sights so revolting that man seldom conceives them in his mind and there was no shrinking seen among the more sensitive of us. We could only help, and ignore shrieks, pus, gangrene, and the disembowelled.”
‘La Patrie’ portrays an horrific incident the artist experienced during the Great War when his Red Cross unit came upon a goods yard full of dead and dying French and German soldiers. They had remained untreated as the casualties exceeded the medical facilities at the front.
Royal Army Medical Corps
But even with those memories the artist returned to the front. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in June 1915, but within months he was paying the price. By January 1916 he had contracted rheumatic fever and invalided out of the army. Not only his health damaged, but he had lost the desire to paint. Back home—as his body healed—he found a new passion for his art. Nevinson sold more paintings in 1916 than ever before and since.
A Tank – 1917
A Tank – 1917 replaced ‘Paths of Glory‘, removed from display at the Leicester Galleries exhibition in 1918.
Tank in an Open Field – 1918
An impression of this print first shown at an exhibition of Nevinson’s official war art held at the Leicester Galleries, London between 1 March and 5 April 1918 (no. 36). The exhibition included 19 prints, 11 lithographs, 6 drypoints and 2 woodcuts.
Jonathan Black noted of this image: “Nevinson depicts a Mark IV Heavy Tank which has been knocked out. When he saw one in France in July 1917 it was the latest design. However, it proved mechanically unreliable and all too vulnerable to plunging shell fire even when used with great success in the early stages of the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917.
His parents used their connections to help him get his work published in the popular press. The public used to the black and white photographs in newspapers and periodicals of the day, so the unique perspective of Nevinson’s colour paintings well received.
After the Recapture of Bapaume, France
Vividly captures the aftermath of the intense battles around the Butte de Warlencourt during the Battle of the Somme. The painting, rooted in genre painting, depicts the soldiers’ somber moment amidst the devastated landscape, emphasizing the human toll of war. Its bold brushwork and dramatic use of color reflect Expressionism, conveying the chaos and emotional intensity of the scene.
Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service;
The artwork emphasizes the strategic importance of the site, once a formidable German defensive position with deep dugouts and barbed wire belts, now overrun, symbolizing both destruction and resilience.
A Howitzer Gun in Elevation
‘A Howitzer Gun in Elevation’ similar to the way Nevinson sought to depict ‘the concentrated essence of warfare’ in his earlier work ‘La Mitrailleuse’. Here he acknowledges the machine gun’s principal battlefield accomplice, and agent in changing the nature of modern warfare. His brutal depiction of a British 8-inch howitzer, its sharply angled barrel ready to fire, captures the mechanical-industrial character of the Great War.
Possibly influenced by gun elevation scenes from such official films as ‘The Battle of Somme’, this massive engine of war conveys a sense of military and industrial power. The absence of any human form accentuates the weapon’s unchallengeable superiority. Emblematic of the nature of modern war with its distanced and detached killing, blunt-muzzled versions of this weapon were to re-appear in his later anti-war works, such as ‘The Unending Cult of Human Sacrifice’, 1934.
War in the Air
War artist C.R.W. Nevinson depicts an air battle involving Canadian air ace, William ‘Billy’ Bishop. Bishop’s plane, with blue, white and red roundel and tail markings, fights at least three German aircraft (CWM 19710261-0517). Bishop, the second-highest ranking Allied ace of the war, credited with the destruction of 72 enemy aircraft.
An impressive painting in the flesh, measuring about 10’x 8′. From the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, at the Canadian War Museum.
His celebrity and parental influence instrumental in July 1917 when selected as one of the first official war artists. Canada would benefit because his works purchased by the Canadian War Memorial Fund, the organization that administered Canada’s war art program.
Swooping Down on a Hostile Plane, 1917
A view of aerial combat with a British Sopwith Camel attacking a German Taube, which is just visible towards the bottom of the composition.
The painting mentioned in correspondence in September 1917 re-worked prior to its presentation to the Imperial War Museum: it may possibly have been the painting ‘Taube Pursued by Commander Samson’ shown in March 1915.
La Mitrailleuse
La Mitrailleuse an oil on canvas painting by British artist C. R. W. Nevinson, from 1915. Made while he was on honeymoon leave from service as an ambulance driver with the RAMC on the Western Front. Held at the Tate Britain, in London.
Mitrailleuse the French word for machine gun, and originated from the mid-19th century French volley gun, the mitrailleuse. The painting shows three soldiers in the trenches wearing metal Adrian helmets, one firing a machine gun. A fourth soldier lies dead beside them. The subjects abstracted into angular geometric blocks of colour, becoming dehumanised components in a machine of death. Nevinson later wrote: “To me the soldier going to be dominated by the machine … I was the first man to express this feeling on canvas.”
Third Tour
He left for France a third time, and spent a month sketching before returning to England to work up the final canvases.
H20198-L395530115
Est: £500 – £700
Over the next seven months he had an astonishing output of over 75 official paintings and prints.
The Road from Arras to Bapaume – 1918
This lithograph sold for GBP 12,600 in 2024. Looking down the Arras-Bapaume road which undulates to the horizon. Flat, featureless fields lie on either side of the road, bordered in places by felled trees. To the upper right is an encampment of eight tents. Figures and vehicles in transit on the left and right of the road. The clouded, grey sky and wet road surface indicates recent heavy rainfall.
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Nevinson repainted the traffic after it was pointed out that he had originally placed it on the wrong side of the road.
The Roads of France
The four panels of his mural The Roads of France depict troops and trucks as they travel over a country road.
As we move from canvas to canvas the consequence of war begins to unfold, and the landscape becomes increasingly devastated. The jagged edges and panoramic compositions add a mechanical aspect to his work.
The viewer can almost hear the industrial whir and crunch of machines as they grind over the stretched and ragged landscape. This subtle impression is appropriate considering WW I marked a period of unprecedented increase in the output of the factories and plants that produced weapons of war.
A Group of Soldiers
A group of four British soldiers in full kit standing beneath a heavy sky. The two men on the left locked in discussion, and the third seems to be listening in.
The other stands in the front of the composition, his hand gripping his rifle, his gazefixed on something beyond the frame.
He later wrote, “For me, Armistice Day will always remain the most remarkable day of emotion in my life. …Never did I imagine that I would live to see another generation come up and face a condition similar to 1914.”
After the Push
The battle-scarred landscape remains deserted with great water-filled craters. In the distance, a series of broken trees line the horizon and exploding shells remind us of the proximity of war.
This work is a critical response to the meaningless destruction of landscape in war.
Nevinson disappointed not to be offered a commission during the Second World War. He railed against Sir Kenneth Clark, chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee, and against the Imperial War Museum. Nevinson had also been in constant correspondence with the Imperial War Museum since the Great owing to his believed ill-treatment by them.
Reliefs at Dawn – 1917
British soldiers walking through a trench at dawn. They wear full kit, and walk with their backs to the viewer. The heaviness of the scene reflected in the grey landscape and sky beyond.
This artwork relocated in August 1939 to a less vulnerable site outside London when the museum activated its evacuation plan.
A Taube
The Taube (Taube translates as ‘Dove’, taub as ‘death’) a German reconnaisance plane but carried bombs that could be thrown from the cockpit. The casual violence of the scene marks the increasing vulnerability of the civilian population. Both the title and the evidence of an explosion imply that this was the cause of death of the child. The assailants deliberately excluded from the painting frame, the point being that they are out of sight and far removed both physically and emotionally from the scene, unable to control their attack or witness its ends.
The body of a small French schoolboy lies on the pavement outside a house. The corpse surrounded by broken cobblestones from a hole blown in the street during an air raid.
In his autobiography, ‘Paint and Prejudice’, Nevinson describes the scene: ‘Dunkirk one of the first towns to suffer aerial bombardment, and I one of the first men to see a child who had been killed by it. There the small boy lay before me, a symbol of all that was to come.’
At first sight, the artist appears to simply demand an emotional response to the death of the Belgian child. Spread-eagled on the pavement, completely unprotected and his death incidental to the attack and to the war. However, the title raises other questions. As war demanded the efforts of entire nations and as the technology of the Great War developed, almost any target could be hit and its legitimacy justified. Judgement is not specifically against the individual pilots but against the means and methods of war.
Post Great War
Nevinson travelled extensively, documenting his observations of New York City and exploring landscapes across Europe. However, his reputation suffered a significant blow after publishing his memoir Paint and Prejudice, marred by inaccuracies and inconsistencies.
Despite these setbacks, Nevinson remained a respected figure in British art history. Recognized as one of the most important war artists of the Great War, whose innovative use of Futurist and Cubist techniques brought a new level of intensity and emotional depth to depictions of conflict.
Death of C.R.W. Nevinson
Nevinson died in London, England, in October 1946. He lived long enough to witness the end of WW II.
