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5 C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946) was one of the finest British printmakers of the 20 th century. The power of his compositions and superb technical ability were acknowledged by a number of his contemporary painter-printmakers such as Walter Richard Sickert (with whom Nevinson would hold a joint exhibition in 1926), Muirhead Bone, Henry Rushbury (who would recommend Nevinson's election to the Royal Academy as an Associate in 1938-39 and would be elected an ARA in April 1939), James McBey, Francis Dodd and Paul Nash (an admirer of Nevinson's wartime drypoints, in particular Ypres After The First Bombardment from 1916). His first prints were drypoints, produced during the summer of 1916, to replicate some of his powerful compositions previously executed in oils and other mediums depicting recollected scenes from his often searing experiences on the Western Front as an ambulance driver and then medical orderly for the Friends Ambulance Unit, from November 1914 to January 1915, and then as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps at the Third London General Territorial Hospital in Wandsworth, London (June 1915-January 1916). Nevinson was never explicit as to where and from whom he took instruction in the technique of drypoint but he was to write in his memoirs published in 1937 that he had looked for guidance to the veteran painter-printmakers Alfred Hartley and Francis Dodd as well as to his friend and contemporary at the Slade School of Art Ian Strang – son of the painter William and elder brother to David. Nevinson would later describe David Strang as a 'wizard' with the printer's press and between 1924 and 1931, he would be the printer for the majority of Nevinson's prints. Nevinson prints depicting the war were exhibited to great acclaim alongside their related oil paintings in his first solo exhibition held at the Leicester Galleries in September-November 1916. Leading critics of the time, such as Paul G. Konody of The Observer and Frank Rutter of The Sunday Times, confidently announced that Nevinson's drypoints such as Returning to the Trenches, Troops Resting and Column on the March indicated a printmaker of considerable talent and promise had undoubtedly arrived on the British art scene. Moreover, other observers, such as the writer H.G. Wells and the leading art critic of the News Chronicle Charles Lewis Hind, argued that Nevinson's vision of the war, perhaps expressed most effectively in his monochrome prints, was the first to capture the stark, grim reality of the conflict – a titanic struggle between masses wearing mass produced uniforms, carrying mass produced weapons and being slaughtered en masse by mass produced artillery pieces in which the individual was brutally submerged. Nevinson The Printmaker By Dr. Jonathan Black Night Arrivals, 1915 Page 92

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