Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was born in London on 13 August 1889. He was the son of radical journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson and the suffragist Margaret Nevinson. His parents’ causes were so unpopular that Nevinson remembered as a child being booed by neighbours whilst walking down the street. He attended the St John’s Wood School of Art 1907-08 and later transferred to the Slade 1908-12, where he got his ‘jollies’ by bullying Stanley Spencer and others. He attended the Académie Julian, Paris 1912-13, shared a studio with Modigliani, worked at the Cercle Russe and made friends with Gino Severini. In 1911 Nevinson discovered Cubism and Futurism and was one of the first English artists to be deeply influenced by new developments in Europe at that time; his work was included in the Post-Impressionists and Futurists exhibition at the Dore Gallery in 1913. He organised a banquet for the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at the Florence Restaurant in November 1913, which prefigured later ‘performance art’ developments. Nevinson found himself enlisted in these remarkable performances, banging a drum backstage, in order to ‘enhance the dynamic qualities’ of Marinetti’s belligerent verse. Nevinson was briefly associated with the Cumberland Market Group. As a founder member of the London Group, and active in the Rebel Art Centre, he wrote, with Marinetti, Vital English Art: A Futurist Manifesto, which was published in the Observer on 7 June 1914 and earned him the ire of Wyndham Lewis, who repudiated the manifesto and within weeks, had announced the arrival of Vorticism. Upon the outbreak of the Great War, Nevinson, as a pacifist, refused to become involved in combat duties and volunteered instead to work for the Red Cross. Sent to France in 1914, he worked as a driver, stretcher-bearer and hospital orderly. Later, he transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps and nursed soldiers being treated in the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth. After contacting rheumatic fever in January, 1916, he was invalided out of the army. While recuperating, Nevinson painted a series of paintings based on his experiences in France. An exhibition of his work in September, 1916, brought him to the attention of Charles Masterman, head of the government’s War Propaganda Bureau. In 1917 he was despatched to the Western Front where he painted another 60 pictures. Nevinson’s most famous war painting is Machine-Gun. His work, featuring ranks of soldiers and shell-bursts are made up of fragmented shards of colour and often look like anticipations of computer graphics. One critic wrote: ‘the hard lines of the machinery dictate those of the robotised soldiers who become as one with the killing machine.’ Another pointed out that: ‘the painting translates the mechanical aspect of modern warfare where man and machine combine to form a single force of nature.’ Other war paintings by Nevinson include The Harvest of Battle, Marching Men, A Group of Soldiers, Troops Resting and The Road from Arras to Bapaume. He was the first artist to draw from the air. Bleak, outspoken and often angry, his paintings of the period 1915-16 are the masterpieces of his career, bravely opposing the prevailing jingoistic tendency. Unsurprisingly, Nevinson was rather unhappy in his work as a member of WPB and some of his paintings such as Paths of Glory, depicting a dead soldier tangled in barbed wire, were considered unacceptable by the censor and not exhibited, until after the Armistice. After the war, Nevinson visited New York, and his emotional response to what he saw there, inspired work such as The Soul of A Soulless City (1920). Nevinson was elected to the NEAC in 1929, the RBA in 1932 and ARA in 1939. In the third phase of his career, he concentrated on painting townscapes and genre pictures. He was an accomplished etcher and lithographer who worked in a variety of styles. His prints, with their bold contrasts and jagged forms marked a complete break with the Whistler tradition. His later landscape and flower pieces were gentler and less radical in design than his work before 1925. He published his autobiography, Paint and Prejudice in 1937. His career as a war artist in the Second World War ended in 1942 when he suffered a severe stroke. He died on 7 October 1946. His Self-Portrait (1911) may be found in the collection of the Tate and interestingly enough, it demonstrates the influence of both Botticelli and Henry Tonks.