page_title: Christopher R. W. Nevinson
section_title: Official war artist
hierarchical_section_title: Christopher R. W. Nevinson / Biography / World War One / Official war artist
caption_attribution_description: English: A Group of Soldiers image: A group of four British soldiers in full kit standing beneath a heavy sky. The two men on the left are locked in discussion, and the third seems to be listening in. The other stands in the front of the composiion, his hand gripping his rifle, his gaze fixed on something beyond the frame.
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: In April 1917, with the support of Muirhead Bone and his own father, Nevinson was appointed an official war artist by the Department of Information. Wearing the uniform of a war correspondent, he visited the Western Front from 5 July to 4 August 1917, a period which included the start of the Battle of Passchendaele on 31 July. Nevinson was billeted with other visitors in the Château d'Harcourt, south of Caen. Although life at the Chateau allowed Nevinson to demonstrate his cocktail making skills to the other visitors, he soon transferred to the 4th Infantry Division near Arras. From there he moved widely along the Front, visiting forward observation posts and artillery batteries. He flew with the Royal Flying Corps and came under anti-aircraft fire. He spent a night in an observation balloon above the Somme. Making his way to a forward post one day he was pinned down by enemy fire for an hour. An unauthorised visit to the Ypres Salient earned Nevinson a reprimand and added to his reputation for recklessness.
  When he returned to London in August 1917, Nevinson first completed six lithographs on the subject of Building Aircraft for the War Propaganda Bureau portfolio of pictures, Britain's Efforts and Ideals, and then spent seven months in his Hampstead studio working up his sketches from the Front into finished pieces. A number of officials from the Department of Information visited the studio and soon began complaining about these new works. Nevinson was now focused on individuals, either as people displaying heroic qualities or as victims of warfare. He did this by painting in a realistic manner using a limited colour palette, sometimes only mud-brown or khaki. Whereas for his 1916 exhibition Nevinson had displayed both realistic works and pieces using Cubist and Futurist techniques, for his 1918 exhibition all the works were realistic in style and composition.
  Not only did the Department of Information art advisors consider these new works dull, but the War Office censors also objected to three of the paintings. Nevinson was quite happy to reverse the direction of traffic in the painting The Road from Arras to Bapaume but was not prepared to compromise over the other two paintings. The censor objected to A Group of Soldiers on the grounds that "the type of man represented is not worthy of the British Army". Amid the sarcasm and vitriol of Nevinson's response, he did make the point that the soldiers in the painting were sketched from a group home on leave from the Front that he had encountered on the London Underground. The canvas was eventually passed for display. Not so Paths of Glory, Nevinson's painting of two fallen British soldiers in a field of mud and barbed wire. Told at the beginning of 1918 that the painting would not be passed for exhibition Nevinson insisted on displaying it with a brown strip of paper across it, with the word 'Censored' scrawled on it. This earned Nevinson a reprimand not just for displaying the painting but using the word 'Censored' without authorisation.
caption: A Group of Soldiers (1917) (Art.IWM ART 520)
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