CRW Nevinson, Cloud Shadows of Spring, circa 1925-26

Nevinson’s artistic career began at the St Johns Wood School of Art in 1907 and the Slade School of Art, London the following year. In 1912 he travelled to Paris, enrolling at the Académie Julian where became acquainted with the Futurist movement from Italian artists Gino Severini and Filippo Marinetti. To the displeasure of his contemporaries, Nevinson took this inspiration back to London, where his criticisms of the British art scene saw him excluded from new avant-garde groups, including Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist movement.

At the start of World War One despite poor health, Nevinson volunteered with the Friends’ Ambulance Service and British Red Cross Society stationed in Dunkirk. His paintings at this time challenged traditional realism, capturing his experiences of the machinery and casualties surrounding fighting soldiers with a stark Futurist and Cubist technique (most famously seen in the oil La Mitrailleuse, 1915, Tate Collection). By 1917, Nevinson was appointed an official war artist tasked to record trench and aerial warfare. His style became more realistic and this shift, combined with Nevinson’s growing opposing feelings to the war saw some of his works censored from public display.

The present work is a superb example of Nevinson’s landscape painting. From 1917, he travelled around The Downs as well as Cornwall, Dorset and Kent, painting in private from a specially designed caravan/mobile studio to avoid raising any notice from the public. Away from the horrors of The Great War, this oil portrays the dramatic undulating hills of the Sussex Downs with a striking modern perspective and light. Set in Spring, a time for new life and growth, the scene suggests a quiet hope for the future: reflecting a place of true solace, untouched by recent conflict and so carefully preserved by its patrons. By the 1920s, Nevinson had moved away from Cubist influences however, the bold lines and exaggerated perspective within the present work captures the beauty and power of nature in a near-abstract manner, with rolling hills filling the canvas to immerse the viewer into the dynamism of the landscape. This painting shares similarities to the artist’s 1917 painting The Wave (Yale Center for British Art, USA) inspired by Hokusai and Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th Century. A flash of bright striking blue and theatrical shadows from the clouds overhead further illustrates Nevinson’s continued fascination with the sky following his time with the Royal Flying Corps.

Cloud Shadows of Spring was purchased directly from the artist by Hamilton Fyfe, a British war journalist and close friend of Nevinson’s father, Henry (also a journalist and war correspondent). The painting was illustrated in Nevinson’s 1937 autobiography Paint and Prejudice as well as being selected for London group and solo exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries, Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery, where the painting was purchased and has been held privately since. A small watercolour of the same scene titled Lewes from the Newhaven Road was also exhibited in 1981 at the Belgrave Gallery, London.

We are very grateful to Christopher Martin for his assistance with cataloguing this work.

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