The Modern English Watercolour

This essay was published in Apollo: The Fine Art Magazine in October 2014.

‘I find [oil] painting so appealing that I’ll have to make a great effort not to paint all the time,’ Vincent van Gogh told a friend in 1882. ‘It’s rather more manly than watercolours, and has more poetry to it.’[1] It is perhaps that first phrase of Van Gogh’s that best captures why watercolours have not received quite the attention they deserve in the story of Modernism. The watercolour, it might seem, is simply too feminine for the modern artist – too redolent of aristocratic ladies, of refined Georgian or Victorian gentlemen, or of enthusiastic amateurs and Sunday artists.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Oise at Auvers (1890), Tate Gallery, London

When in 2011 Tate Britain staged ‘Watercolour’, its first ever exhibition devoted solely to the medium, it was felt by many critics that this largely chronological show lost direction once it reached the Modern era. ‘As the show moves into the twentieth century,’ Richard Dorment suggested in The Daily Telegraph ‘it hurtles into chaos. It is an inarguable fact that the great tradition that began in the eighteenth century died out at the beginning of the twentieth. Few major artists painted in watercolour and those that did used it only occasionally.’[2] This ‘inarguable fact’ reveals a common misconception. There is of course a long and distinguished history of the watercolour in British art, and it is widely considered a peculiarly British medium whose golden age began in the eighteenth century, peaked in the mid nineteenth century and dwindled towards its end. An article in The Burlington Magazine in 1905 complained of ‘the failure of our water-colour tradition’, lamenting, ‘[h]ow many works of the so-called English School of Water-Colour could be hung by the side of an old Japanese print without looking either weak or garish?’[3] Yet watercolour did play a significant role in the Modern movement of the early twentieth century, both in Britain and abroad. That history is worth closer examination.

Despite his criticism of its ‘unmanly’ aspect, Van Gogh was a keen watercolourist. ‘How marvelous watercolour is for expressing space and airiness,’ he told his brother rapturously in 1881, ‘allowing the figure to be part of the atmosphere and life to enter it.’[4] He continued to use watercolour (often in combination with pen and ink, oil or gouache) intermittently until his death in 1890, often with remarkable results. Another godfather of Modernism who used watercolour both to develop his ideas and as an end in its self was Paul Cézanne. ‘It is Cézanne who was the precursor and illuminator of Cubism,’ wrote the French modernist Robert Delaunay, who saw revelatory exhibitions of the recently deceased artist’s watercolours in Paris in 1909 and 1910. ‘Cézanne’s watercolours: the investigation of coloured planes … or rather luminous planes which destroy the subject.’[5] 

Modernism was thus not born free of the watercolour, and works on paper that incorporated watercolour by Van Gogh and Cézanne were included in Roger Fry’s category defining Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. It is perhaps not surprising that it is to this same date that the critic and curator Frank Rutter placed the ‘increasingly conspicuous’ appearance in London exhibitions of ’watercolour drawings, based upon the definite line and decorative composition of the early topographical draughtsmen of Great Britain’.[6] Rutter was a leading champion of the Modern movement in Britain. In 1907, with the support of friends in the Fitzroy Street Group, he formed the Allied Artists' Association with a view to bringing artists working in France to the attention of British audiences, and in 1913 he curated an influential Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London’s Bond Street. The Italian Futurists inspired the foundation of the British modernist movement, Vorticism. Like the Futurists, the Vorticists advocated a break with the past and a modern art that embraced the industrial, the urban, the mechanical and the abstract. Yet even they did not eschew watercolour. Percy Wyndham Lewis, the movement’s founder, and Edward Wadsworth, one of its more talented artists, produced numerous works in what might have been taken as a rather old-fashioned medium for such a forward-looking movement. At the same time, many other significant European Modernists – Raoul Dufy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele – were keen and adept watercolorists.

Percy Wyndham Lewis, Composition (1913), Tate Gllery, London

When Paul Nash, who would become one of Britain’s leading figures of the avant-garde, arrived at the Slade School of Art in 1910 he was happy to advance his career solely as a watercolourist. His remarkable paintings undertaken as an Official War Artist on the Ypres Salient in November and December 1917 were all on paper. According to his wife, ‘Some of these water colours … actually had mud spattered upon them from nearby exploding shells, which he at times worked in to help with the colour of the drawing.’[7] The grandiosity of the subject did not defy the medium: they were drawings made in a frenzy of passion, images that would endure as among the most sublime, terrifying and beautiful representations ever made of the First World War. They were also very modern, for in the trenches Nash had embraced the techniques (if not the tenets) of Vorticism. ‘I know of no works of art made by any artist working there who saw the splendours and miseries of the greatest of all theatres of war so grandly’, wrote John Rothenstein in 1955. ‘Out of infinite horror [Nash] distilled a new poetry. The best of them will take their place among the finest imaginative works of our time …’[8] 

Of course, the situation in which Nash worked demanded a portable medium that could be used rapidly under fire: other Official War Artists, including William Orpen and John Singer Sargent, worked in watercolour at the Front; they could hardly have carried easels on to the battlefield. And in due course Nash realized that the immensity of his subject – as well as the need for permanent, large-scale records – almost demanded that he advance into oil painting; yet it was only in early 1918, as he approached his twenty-ninth birthday, that he completed his first work in the medium. As he told his friend Gordon Bottomley, these first attempts had been ‘a complete experiment you know – a piece of towering audacity I suppose as I had never painted before ...’[9] Almost inevitably, one of his first and most famous oil paintings, We Are Making a New World (1918) was a direct interpretation of an original drawing, whilst his epic canvas, The Menin Road, now in the Imperial War Museum, was rendered first in watercolour.

By 1926 Frank Rutter was suggesting in his book Evolution in Modern Art that any frequenter of art exhibitions in London and Paris over the past thirty years,

must have observed that the greatest difference between the pictures of the past and of the present is that there is less and less of the ‘foggy’ Impressionist type of pictured, in which ‘atmosphere’ was the goal, and more and more of a clear, clean-hewn type of picture in which the accent is laid on design. This tendency, visible in pictures of all descriptions in Paris as in London, has become most pronounced in the modern water-colour. From it has arisen a new school of water-colour, which is perhaps the most rich in promise of any contemporary British movement.[10]

Rutter considered one of the most exciting manifestations of this new contemporary movement was the recent establishment of the Modern English Watercolour Society. The founders, who included Paul Nash and his brother John, Edward Wadsworth, Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner, Lucien Pissarro, Ethelbert White and Randolph Schwabe, all felt that their watercolours were not receiving a fair chance of being properly seen at mixed shows. As both the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours already offered exhibition opportunities exclusively devoted to the medium, these artists clearly wished to distinguish themselves from their fellow practitioners, perhaps most obviously in their use of the word ‘Modern’. ‘The quality of the work shown justifies the formation of the new society,’ The Burlington Magazine observed in a brief notice of Nash and his colleagues’ first exhibition in May 1923, ‘and it is a great comfort to be able to study a moderate number of good drawings by themselves.’[11]

Paul Nash, The Tench Pond in a Gale (1921-22), Tate Gallery, London

For the next five or six years the Modern English Watercolour Society held exhibitions, with catalogues prefaced by Rutter. The modern watercolour was also championed by organisations such as the Contemporary Art Society, which acquired Paul Nash’s watercolour Tench Pond in a Gale (1921-2) and presented it to the Tate Gallery in 1924. There it would be an important influence on young artists such as Nash’s pupil at the Royal College of Art, Eric Ravilious.[12] Ravilious would be one of the chief artists from the younger generation to carry forward the English school of watercolours, but other significant practitioners would include John Piper, Edward Burra, David Jones, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, John Tunnard, John Minton and Keith Vaughan.

As well as exhibiting with the Modern English Watercolour Society, Nash contributed works to various other group exhibitions devoted exclusively to watercolours, and he held a number of solo shows in this medium. From 1918 until his death in 1946 he continued to paint both in watercolour and oils. He was actually working on a watercolour on the day of his death, and his late works in the medium reveal a more fluid handling and the possibilities of exciting new avenues. Though his works in oil are his most well known today, it would be wrong to suggest that they eclipsed his watercolours in the eyes of contemporaries. In 1929 the prominent critic R.H. Wilenski called Nash ‘the John Sell Cotman of to-day’ – putting him on a par with another artist who painted in both media (though Cotman is more famous today for his watercolours).[13] A solo exhibition of Nash’s watercolours held in London in 1932 was particularly successful: ‘Certainly Mr. Paul Nash is one of our most interesting artists,’ The Times observed, ‘particularly when … he works in water-colour.’[14] An exhibition of sixty new watercolours three years later elicited the response in the same newspaper that ‘water-colour seems more apt for his purposes than oil, in which he sometimes gives the impression of subjecting the fatter medium to the restrictions of fresco.’[15]

Nevertheless, many admirers today of Nash’s most famous works such as Totes Meer or We Are Making a New World may not be aware that he painted in watercolour at all. Though I was sixteen when I first discovered his work, it was not until I was in my thirties that I realized the full extent of his work as a watercolorist. Partly this was (and remains) the fault of the public museums and galleries that hold his work: put simply, with the exception of retrospectives and special exhibitions, his works on paper are so rarely hung. Tate Britain’s 2013 rehanging of its collection in chronological order was well-received, but was almost entirely devoted to oil paintings, as if works on paper did not play a significant role in that history. The extensive recent rebuilding of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford did not incorporate a space devoted to its extraordinary collection of works on paper; and despite the supposed significance of the ‘English School of Watercolour’, there is still no permanent venue where this school can be studied in its entirety.

This criticism is not exclusive to the Tate or the Ashmolean, and attention might be drawn to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, or even the Victoria and Albert Museum. Of course, this absence is partly due to the nature of the medium itself: watercolours simply cannot be exposed to light for long periods of time, a factor that has always (literally) diminished their public exposure, and which has also played a significant part in their ongoing under appreciation. These collections are, however, available to be seen: all the aforementioned institutions have excellent Prints and Drawings Rooms open to the public, offering the most intimate opportunity to view almost any of their works at first hand.

Yet by removing their works on paper to the private sphere, the average visitor or tourist is deprived of easily seeing these often-extraordinary collections, and may spend a lifetime unaware of the place or significance of the watercolour drawing in the history of art. This limitation could be alleviated by dedicated exhibition spaces with a rotating display taken from the permanent collection. To the best of my knowledge, the only British institutions offering such spaces are the British Museum and Tate Britain (which has rooms devoted to works on paper by Turner and Blake, as well as the recent welcome addition of a large space devoted to displaying material from their archive collection). Perversely, given that there are no issues of conservation or additional cost, the more general art historical publications tend to reproduce the (more famous) oil works at the expense of works on paper, thus perpetuating the art historical imbalance. A look at any general book on Cézanne will confirm this.

When Paul Nash neared the end of his life and was struggling to complete his autobiography, it was to his earliest works on paper that he returned. ‘When I came to look into the early drawings I lived again that wonderful hour,’ he told Gordon Bottomley. ‘I could feel myself making those drawings – in some ways the best I ever did to this day. And because of this I suddenly saw the way to finish my ‘life’ … I feel I could make a complete thing by taking it up to 1914 – just up to the war. After that it was another life, another world.’[16] In examining the career of an artist like Paul Nash, or those of his colleagues in the Modern English Watercolour Society, or their precursors such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, let us not overlook the extent to which they worked with water-based media as well as oil.

---

[1] Vincent Van Gogh, Letter 256, to Anthon van Rappard, The Hague, 13 August 1882, in Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker (The Van Gogh Museum, 2009), at www.vangoghletters.org.

[2] The Daily Telegraph, 15 February 2011.

[3] P.A., ‘The Failure of our Water-colour Tradition,’ The Burlington Magazine, vol. 7, no. 26, May 1905, 112-15.

[4] Vincent Van Gogh, Letter 192, to Theo Van Gogh, The Hague, about 18 December 1881, www.vangoghletters.org.

[5] Robert Delaunay, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, edited by Arthur A. Cohen (New York, 1968), 20.

[6] Frank Rutter, Evolution in Modern Art: A Study of Modern Painting, 1870—1925 (London: George G. Harrap, 1926), 146.

[7] Margaret Nash, ‘Memoirs of Paul Nash, 1913-1946’, unpublished MS, 1951, Tate Gallery Archive, London, TGA 769.2.6.

 (1951), f. 16-17.

[8] John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, Sickert to Moore (London: Eyre and Spotiswood, 1957), 347-8.

[9] Paul Nash to Gordon Bottomley, 16 July 1918, in Claude Colleer Abbott and Anthony Bertram (eds.), Poet & Painter. Being the Correspondence Between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash, 1910–1946 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 98

[10] Frank Rutter, Evolution in Modern Art: A Study of Modern Painting, 1870—1925 (London: George G. Harrap, 1926), 145.

[11] The Burlington Magazine, vol. 42, no 242, May 1923, 261.

[12] Alan Power, Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities (London: Imperial War Museum, 2004), 37.

[13] The Observer, 13 October 1929.

[14] The Times, 4 November 1932

[15] The Times, 15 April 1935.

[16] Paul Nash to Gordon Bottomley, Abbott and Bertram (1955), 219.

I Am Spain

When writing a book there's always material that has to be cut - sometimes that's a good thing: it just might not be right for the place you want it to go; or it might just be self-indulgent, and you know it ought to go. I wanted to include the following as an opening scene-setter for my 2012 book, I Am Spain. It is almost entirely taken from Claud Cockburn's 1936 book, Reporter in Spain (written under the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn). This blog seems like a good place to publish it. The accompanying photo of Cockburn with Fred Copeman of the British Battalion of the International Brigades was taken at the battle of Brunete in the summer of 1937 by Gerda Taro, very shortly before her death. For a while she was the lover of Robert Capa, and in my opinion was (or could have been) the greater war reporter.

Early on a warm July morning in 1936 a young British reporter sat down for breakfast in the station café at Cerbère. Nestling on the coastline where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, this was the last railway stop in southern France before the Spanish border.

Claud Cockburn was no ordinary journalist. Though he possessed a lax attitude to facts, his old school friend the novelist Graham Greene would call him one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century. Perhaps more accurately, the British secret service considered him a ‘professional mischief maker’ whose ‘intelligence’, ‘capability’ and ‘unscrupulous nature’ made him ‘a formidable factor with which to reckon’. Born in Peking in 1904, Cockburn had been educated at public school and Oxford. A heavy drinker and smoker, he was ever in a hurry (his wife would describe him as being like a rag-doll, his elongated arms and dangling legs ever in vigorous motion).

In the late 1920s he had worked for that most establishment of British newspapers, The Times – first in Berlin, then in America. Arriving in New York City in 1929 it had soon become apparent that what was happening on Wall Street was everything. ‘You could talk about prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses,’ he later wrote, ‘but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was where the conversation became serious.’ If the Great War had been the first global disaster of the twentieth century, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the second. After the Crash, the Depression descended upon the world (to use George Orwell’s apt phrase) ‘like an ice age’. It was no exaggeration to say that many liberal thinkers saw Western civilization as on the brink of collapse.

Claud Cockburn and Fred Copeman, Brunete, July 1937.

Having read Karl Marx in Germany, Cockburn was already a convinced Communist, believing that ‘the Party’ was the one organization that could combat the rising tide of Fascism, and that the communists alone could save the disposed from capitalist oppression. Quitting The Times in 1932, Cockburn had launched his own political paper, The Week. Sources were plentiful, for ‘under the frightful overhanging menace of Hitlerism,’ he observed, ‘there roamed through the capitals of Western Europe people who were half saint and half bandit – the sort of people who would commit a murder for twenty pounds and suicide for a good idea.’ Relying on a network of sometimes brave, sometimes unscrupulous fellow journalists, inside informers, disaffected civil servants, tip-off merchants and whistle-blowers, on three pages of foolscap Cockburn published stories of international rumour, supposed plots, libellous gossip, plausible intrigues and assertive opinions (largely his own). He would later boast that readers of his scurrilous periodical included the foreign ministers of eleven nations, the staff of all the embassies in London, a dozen US Senators, fifty MPs, the King of England and the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

As if The Week was not enough work for one man, Cockburn

was also a special correspondent for The Daily Worker. It was on behalf of this Communist Party newspaper that he found himself in Cerbère that July in 1936, en route to Catalonia to report on the Workers’ Olympiad that was due to open in Barcelona in a few days’ time.

When the sea air smelt suddenly of violets, Cockburn looked up and watched as a tall, fattish gentleman in expensive clothes and carrying a perfumed handkerchief walked in. Two men followed him – dressed in tight-cut Palm Beach suits like prohibition-era gangsters, they hardly bothered to conceal the pistols at their hips.

            When the noise came of a train rolling through the tunnel from Spain the fat man and his bodyguards rose from their chairs and left.

            ‘Somebody in particular? Cockburn asked the waiter.

            ‘They say so.’

            ‘Well, and …?’

            ‘A Colonel or something or other from Madrid’, said the waiter. ‘Big shot. Has an aeroplane up in Perpignan. Colonel of aviation I think. Lives at the Grand Hotel. Very swell.’

            ‘So what?’

            ‘So nothing. Except that they say – I’m just telling you what they say – that he isn’t there for nothing, so to speak. Possibly you understand something of the situation in Spain.’

            ‘Well?’

            ‘Well a fortnight ago this fellow comes hell for leather over the frontier at Le Perthus, by car of course, and goes up to Perpignan at the Grand Hotel. He was mixed up some way in killing the miners in Asturias last year and the year before or whenever it was. That’s why he had to beat it after the elections. They say he has a mission.’

            ‘Such as?’

            ‘How should I know? I suppose you and I think the rich are going to sit quiet and – what’s the phrase? – “accept the verdict of the pee-pull?” Like hell they are.’

            ‘This is the twelfth of July. Five months after the elections.’

            ‘All the longer to get ready.’

            ‘So the Colonel, what is he doing down here on the frontier?’

            ‘Well, I should say, and our Spanish comrades here say that he is, so to speak, listening for something.’

            ‘Listening?’

            The waiter made a gesture, indicating a man putting his ear to the ground.

            ‘You think he’ll hear something soon?’

            The waiter grimaced. Cockburn stood up – it was time to catch the Barcelona train.

From his carriage Cockburn watched the fascist Colonel standing on the opposite platform, expensive and perfumed with his sleek bodyguards, listening for news of a steadily thickening plot against his country. It would not be long now.

            And it occurred to Cockburn that if you wanted 1936’s equivalent for those symbolic figures of Death that appear in medieval wall paintings – well, that Spanish Colonel … he would do.

Edgar Astaire's collection at Christie's, London

 In June 2015 Christie's in London sold some of Edgar Astaire's outstanding collection of twentieth-century British art, including Gertler's painting The Violinist,  which made a record price for the artist, realising £542,500 on the night. This is the short essay that they invited me to write to accompany the catalogue:

In the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the First World War the British art scene exploded in an extraordinary outburst of vitality. This was the arrival of Modernism, the moment when that now familiar phrase, the avant garde, first entered the English lexicon. It saw the emergence of a remarkable crop of talents, many of whom are represented in Edgar Astaire’s outstanding collection. Coincidentally, the majority of the artists he collected – Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Augustus John, Mark Gertler, C.R.W. Nevinson, David Bomberg, William Roberts and Isaac Rosenberg– were all linked by their attendance at one particular art school: the Slade. Founded in 1871 as part of University College London, by the last decade of the nineteenth century the Slade had become one of the most advanced places in Britain to study art, fostering under its drawing master, Henry Tonks, a keen attention to life study and meticulous draughstmanship.

Augustus John and Mark Gertler (as well as Gertler’s contemporary at the Slade, Stanley Spencer) were among Tonks’s most talented pupils. Indeed, John Singer Sargent would remark of John’s student drawings that nothing like them had been seen since the Renaissance, and he would tell the young David Bomberg that the Slade ‘was the finest School for Draughstmanship in the world’. This was Tonks’s ambition: to point his students back to the long tradition of Western art history, to reveal to them the Old Masters, and to encourage them to produce their finest work within this tradition. The great names Tonks encouraged his students to study and emulate included Michelangelo, Holbein, Rubens, Rembrandt, Ingres and Watteau – artists whose work they diligently studied first hand at the National Gallery, the British Museum and Dulwich Picture Gallery. Thus we witness John’s exquisite portrait of his mistress and second wife, Dorothy McNeill (known as Dorelia), as well as Gertler’s startlingly accomplished drawing of his friend, muse and fellow Slade student, Dora Carrington, together with his early Renaissance-inspired paintings of Carrington and the mysterious Violinist. Isaac Rosenberg’s extraordinary self-portrait reveals these young artists’ remarkable ability to capture the personality in a face – their own, or another’s. This is drawing hard won only by looking, from endless hours of labour in the life class.

 Mark Gertler, The Violinist (1912)

This period was not just about its personalities, however. It was also about the eruption of a range of movements and manifestoes – the dramatic arrival in Britain of a series of exciting challenges to Tonks’s long academic tradition. Roger Fry – the Bloomsbury critic and painter who would so dominate aesthetic taste and debate in the opening decades of twentieth-century England – called the continental artists who mounted this challenge to traditionally perceived representations the Post-Impressionists. They included some of the greatest names of modern European art: Manet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne and Picasso. In two exhibitions held in London in 1910 and 1912, Fry brought their new vision to a startled and largely unsuspecting British audience. Many of the critics were appalled. As The Times observed, such work ‘throws away all that the long-developed skills of past artists had acquired and bequeathed. It begins all over again – and stops where a child would stop.’ ‘I cannot teach what I don’t believe in,’ Tonks declared when it was suggested that he might open up the Slade’s curriculum to these new influences. ‘I shall resign if this talk about Cubism does not cease; it is killing me.’

Alongside the appearance of Post-Impressionists art in England, there was also the arrival of the Futurists – a group of Italian artists led by the larger-than-life poet and controversialist, Filippo Marinetti. The Futurists, as one English critic observed at the time, ‘are young men in revolt at the worship of the past. They are determined to destroy it, and erect upon its ashes the Temple of the future. War seems to be the tenet in the gospel of Futurism: war upon the classical in art, literature and music.’ It sounded exciting, and though C.R.W. Nevinson became the Futurists’ only English convert, they inspired other younger generation artists. These converts included David Bomberg, who embraced the idea of a new, increasingly abstract art that explored the drama of the urban world around him; by 1914 Bomberg was producing some of the most dynamic, exciting and unsellable work in London. It was this fusion of ideas and outpouring of innovative work that helped lead Percy Wyndham Lewis (himself a Slade graduate) to found the Vorticist movement shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, with the American sculptor Jacob Epstein among his young associates. Between them, the work of this group of young artists marks a pinnacle of British artistic production that was not really to be repeated until the emergence of the Pop Artists in the 1950s and ‘60s – artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, a second wave that is also represented (albeit on a much smaller scale) in Astaire’s collection.

It was, of course, the Great War that undermined this dynamism. Nevinson, Bomberg, Roberts and Rosenberg would all eventually volunteer for military service, with the latter being killed in action in April 1918. Only Gertler refused to participate in what he called the ‘wretched, sordid butchery’; he registered as a conscientious objector, and in 1916 painted his anti-war masterpiece, The Merry-Go-Round. That same year,Walter Sickert would write of Nevinson’s 1915 painting, La Mitrailleuse that it ‘will probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting.’ Sickerts judgement has proved accurate, and La Mitrailleuse remains one of the definitive images of the conflict.

A lifeline for both art and artists would eventually be offered by the Government’s official war artists scheme, launched in 1916, and followed later on by a similar programme of record, propaganda and memorial run by the Canadian government. Nevinson, Bomberg, Roberts, Rothenstein and Augustus John all saw service with one of even both of these schemes. As well as keeping many talented young artists alive, the War Artists scheme also gave them hope at a time when the future seemed to offer none. ‘There is a good time coming for Art yet in England,’ Mark Gertler predicted after receiving a commission to paint an official picture in 1918. ‘I have a feeling that we are going to have good painting, after the War, there are good times coming if only we can hold out. This War is not the end.’

For a moment, Gertler’s prediction seemed to hold true. Shortly after the Armistice the prominent New York collector Albert Eugene Gallatin visited Europe, and was fascinated by what he saw in London. ‘Pulsating with life and possessing a distinctly fresh vision,’ he told an interviewer from The Observer in 1921, ‘a movement is now well under way which, in my opinion, will develop into one of the great epochs of English painting. Paris and New York cannot in this respect vie with London.’ This new vitality had its origins immediately before the war. It had then been interrupted by the war, before being reinvigorated by it. Sadly, its promise was not fully realized. C.R.W. Nevinson had his moment in New York, when that city seemed to promise him a way forward, to maintain the momentum from the war, but it was not to be. David Bomberg was forced abroad, travelling to Palestine, and later to Spain, to pursue his remarkable vision. Neither John’s nor Gertler’s star ever shone so bright again, and it would be many decades before London really did vie with Paris and New York to hold the crown of contemporary art. For a moment, however, it had seemed that it was here, in England, out of the horrors of war, that Western art’s future might really lie.