Christopher R . W . Nevinson Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson ( 13 August 1889 – October 1946 ) was a British figure and landscape painter , etcher and lithographer . He is often referred to by his initials C . R . W . Nevinson , and was known as Richard . Early life . Richard Nevinson , one of the most famous war artists of World War I , was born in 1889 , the son of the war correspondent and journalist Henry Nevinson and the suffrage campaigner and writer Margaret Nevinson . Educated at Uppingham School , which he hated , Nevinson went on to study at the St John ' s Wood School of Art . Inspired by seeing the work of Augustus John , he decided to attend the Slade School of Art , part of University College , London . There his contemporaries included Mark Gertler , Stanley Spencer , Paul Nash and Dora Carrington . Gertler was , for a time , his closest friend and influence , and they formed for a short while a group known as the Neo - Primitives , being deeply influenced by the art of the early Renaissance . However , Gertler and Nevinson subsequently fell out when they both fell in love with Carrington . Whilst at the Slade , Nevinson was advised by his Professor of Drawing , Henry Tonks , to abandon thoughts of an artistic career . Nevinson ' s war memoir " Paint and Prejudice " ( London , Methuen , 1937 ) , although lively and colourful , is as in parts inaccurate , inconsistent , and misleading . Career . On leaving 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 , whose members included Edward Wadsworth and Ezra Pound . 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 ( though he devised the title for the Vorticists ' famous magazine , " BLAST " ) . At the outbreak of World War I , Nevinson joined the Friends ' Ambulance Unit , which his father had helped to found , and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French soldiers . For a brief period he served as a volunteer ambulance driver ( Nov 1914 to Jan 1915 ) before ill health forced his return to Britain . He used these experiences as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used Futurist techniques to great effect . His fellow artist Walter Sickert wrote at the time that Nevinson ' s painting " La Mitrailleuse " ( now in the Tate collection ) ' will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting . ' Subsequently Nevinson volunteered for home service with the Royal Army Medical Corps , before being invalided out ; he was eventually appointed as an official war artist , though his later paintings , based on a short visit to the Western Front , lacked the same powerful effect as those earlier works which had helped to make him one of the most famous young artists working in England . By 1917 , Nevinson was no longer finding Modernist styles adequate for describing the horrors of modern war . " Paths of Glory , " depicting two fallen British soldiers in a field of mud and barbed wire , is typical of his later war paintings in its stark realism and complete lack of Futurist or Vorticist effects . A large collection of his work can be found in the Imperial War Museum in London . Shortly after the end of the war , Nevinson travelled to the United States of America , where he painted a number of powerful images of New York . However , his boasting and exaggerated claims of his war experiences , together with his depressive and temperamental personality , made him many enemies in both the USA and Britain . Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group was a particularly virulent critic . In 1920 , the critic Lewis Hind observed in his catalogue introduction to an exhibition of Nevinson ' s recent work : ‘ It is something , at the age of thirty one , to be among the most discussed , most successful , most promising , most admired and most hated British artists . ’ His post - war career , however , was not so distinguished . Nevinson was credited with holding the first cocktail party in Britain in 1924 by Alec Waugh .