page_title: Christopher R. W. Nevinson
section_title: Medical orderly
hierarchical_section_title: Christopher R. W. Nevinson / Biography / World War One / Medical orderly
caption_attribution_description: English: The Doctor image: Doctors and medical orderlies are treating injured soldiers in an open building with straw on the floor. One patient, stripped to the waist, is sitting up on a stretcher while a doctor inspects a loosely dressed wound to his head. Next to him a body lies on a stretcher the face covered in bandages. Behind, a patient is crouching on all fours with his trousers round his ankles, while a doctor inspects a wound in his lower back. Two other French soldiers stand by with arms in slings.
context_page_description: Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson ARA was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W. Nevinson, and was also known as Richard.
  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 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.
context_section_description: At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, which his father had helped to found. From 13 November 1914, Nevinson spent nine weeks in France with the FAU and the British Red Cross Society, mostly working at a disused goods shed by Dunkirk rail station known as the Shambles. The Shambles housed some three thousand badly wounded French troops, who had been evacuated from the Front and then all but abandoned. For weeks they had been left unfed and untended with the dead and dying lying together on dirty straw. Nevinson, alongside his father and other volunteers, worked to dress wounds, help clean and disinfect the shed and started to make it habitable. Nevinson later depicted his experiences in The Shambles in two paintings, The Doctor and La Patrie. As the French authorities began to take control of the situation, Nevinson was reassigned as an ambulance driver. Although Nevinson would often make much of this time as an ambulance driver, particularly in his publicity material, he only held the role for a week as, due to his poor health, he lacked the strength to steer the vehicle. By January 1915 his worsening rheumatism had made him unfit for further service and he returned to Britain.
  Nevinson had four pictures included in the Second Exhibition of the London Group held in March 1915. Nevinson's Futurist painting, Returning to the Trenches, and the sculpture The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein received the most attention and greatest praise in reviews of the show. After his father received assurances that he would not be posted abroad, Nevinson enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and spent the rest of 1915 working at the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth. Despite its name, the 3rd LGH was a specialist centre for the treatment of both shell shock and severe facial injuries. Nevinson worked there as an orderly and as a labourer helping build roads and fit out new wards. Sometimes he would be sent to Charing Cross to meet, and unload, the hospital trains arriving from France and for a while he worked on a ward for mental patients. Nevinson married Kathleen Knowlman on 1 November 1915 at Hampstead Town Hall and, after a week-long honeymoon, he reported back to the RAMC but was invalided out of the service in January 1916 with acute rheumatic fever.
caption: The Doctor (1916) (Art.IWM ART 725)
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