Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

The painter and etcher Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was a war artist and important member of the British avant-garde, whose work is particularly concerned with the urban landscape.

Nevinson was born in Hampstead, the only son of the journalist Henry Wood Nevinson (1856–1941) and the writer and suffragette Margaret Nevinson, née Wynne Jones (1858–1932). After attending University College School and Uppingham, Nevinson began his artistic training at St John's Wood School of Art (1907–8), and then at the Slade School of Fine Art (1908–12). He continued his education in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Cercle Russe (1912-13), sharing a studio with Modigliani.

Although he began by painting in an impressionist style, he soon fell under the influence of the Italian futurist painters Gino Severini and Filippo Marinetti in 1913, whose style he helped introduce to England shortly before the First World War. He published the futurist manifesto Vital English Art with Marinetti (1914).

Nevinson served in the First World War as a Red Cross orderly and with the Royal Army Medical Corps before illness led to his military discharge in 1916. The works that resulted from his experience include a number of highly emotive paintings in the futurist idiom as well as more journalistic works executed as official war art commissions. These brought him to the attention of a wide public.

Between the wars he also worked as a journalist, contributing outspoken columns on art and society to the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the New Statesman, the Strand Magazine, and Harper's Bazaar. He worked again as a war artist in 1940, but stopped painting after suffering a series of strokes in 1942 and 1943.

The Museum of London collection includes oil paintings, watercolours etchings and a poster design by Nevinson.