Further Reading and Additional Material from Paul Gough

Paul Gough provides the following notes and references to accompany 'Four Artists'.

C R W Nevinson

Letter: Nevinson to Charles F.G. Masterman, 30 July 1917, Nevinson file, Imperial War Museum, London

Letter: Charles F.G Masterman to John Buchan, 18 May 1917, Masterman files in Imperial War Museum, London Department of Art.

For a full and lively account of the cohort of students to which Nevinson belonged see David Boyd Haycock, 'A Crisis of Brilliance’: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (London: Old Street, 2010); also Paul Gough, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War, (Bristol: Sansom & Company, 2010).

Images referenced in text:  Marching Men,1916. Pastel on paper, 13.9 x 20.3 cm. IWM:ART 5218; Returning to the Trenches, 1914, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 76.2 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. A woodcut version of the latter was reproduced in the ‘War Number’ of Blast, published in July 1915.

Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century (London: Michael Joseph, 1983) p.39. Still fearful of Futurist excesses, British critics described Nevinson’s work at this time as ‘a compromise between clear illustration and Futurist abstraction, which is absolutely intelligible without being… literal representation.’ P.G. Konody, ‘Art and Artists: the Friday Club’, Observer, 26 March 1916.

Le Mitrailleuse, 1915. Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm. Tate Gallery, London. No.3177. It was painted during Nevinson’s leave and while he was on honeymoon, part of it spent in Ramsgate.

Charles Lewis Hind, The Evening News, 16 March 1916 (Tate Gallery Archive, 7311.2A-145).8

Sickert , Burlington Magazine, September / October 1916.

Stanley Spencer

An extended version of this essay, with notes, is in the Articles section of the website.

Henri Gaudier

An extended version of this essay is in the Articles section of the website.