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10 Exchange crash. At the same time Nevinson had been experiencing a series of serious health problems that were in part related to the effects of bouts of rheumatic fever he had suffered in 1915-16. He was even advised by one of his doctors in the summer of 1932 to give up etching altogether as the acid fumes associated with the process were attacking his lungs and impairing his breathing. He made his last prints, competent if rather tame etchings of the bridges of central Paris, in 1930-31. Ironically, Nevinson gave up printmaking at the very moment when his reputation as a printmaker stood at its apogee. In November 1931 six of his etchings had been selected for inclusion in the first exhibition of British Modern Art to be held in Tokyo while in May 1932 art critic and print aficionado Malcolm C. Salaman devoted a volume of his prestigious series Modern Masters of Etching to him. Previous volumes had explored the work of such printmaking giants as Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec. A year later, however, for the front cover of the April 1933 Studio Magazine as a special favour to the editor Nevinson produced a lithograph which is illuminated by much of his old crackling energy and compositional dash – The Spirit of Progress offers a mordant commentary on the nature of modern civilisation and the daunting threat to its existence posed by the bomber aircraft. The design is infused by the writings of H.G. Wells, a friend of his since 1916, urgently prophesising the future destruction of London from the air in his novel The Shape of Things To Come (1933) and the recent speeches of Conservative Party Leader Stanley Baldwin who, in November 1932 had chilled the collective blood of the British people by warning in the House of Commons that: 'the bomber will always get through.' As it happened, both Wells and Baldwin owned examples of Nevinson's prints depicting the English countryside and scenes of London – in particular his expansive view of smoky London rooftops: London from Parliament Hill (1924). Grimy, with plentiful evidence of its prevalent pollution and foul-smelling air, this was the London Nevinson frequently stated he was proud to call home – he could not imagine living anywhere else although he would never turn down the chance to visit the Paris he evoked so skilfully in La Cité (1926). This was the city whose inhabitants he would serve during the Blitz of 1940 as a stretcher-bearer even though he was far from well; indeed his exertions whilst working amidst the bombing raids at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead brought on a stroke which partially paralysed his right hand for the last six years of his life. Nevinson died at home on Haverstock Hill in October 1946. More than one of his obituaries was to state that, while Nevinson richly deserved to be remembered for his exploits as 'England's solitary Futurist' and as one of the British artists to most eloquently sum up the visceral experience of the Great War, his very real achievements as a printmaker who also captured the febrile energy of Jazz Age London, Paris and New York, should not go unmentioned, nor be underestimated. Contemporaries of his had made far more prints but Nevinson perhaps produced at most 150 prints between 1916 and 1933, and had earned more money for them but few among their number possessed the sheer talent to produce works of such compelling power as the lithographs: Making the Engine (1917) and The Workers (1919), with their virtuoso poster-like simplicity, vivid immediacy and directness, or conjure the delicate, enigmatic stillness of later etchings such as Venice Night (1920), Romney Marsh (1922-23) as well as the brooding, crepuscular Sèvres (1927) saturated with a subtle hint of pastoral menace. As is so often the case with Nevinson, once seen, his best prints are impossible to forget. Venice Night, c.1920 Page 69 La Cité, Paris, 1926-7 Page 63 London from Parliament Hill, c.1923 Page 51

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