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7 suggest the artist deftly drawing upon the example not just of Cezanne, but also of El Greco. Among those who admired the twenty war prints exhibited in the solo show Nevinson held as an official war artist at the Leicester Galleries in March 1918 were his fellow war artists Augustus John, Sir John Lavery and William Orpen – who would become a close friend, so much so that in 1929 he proposed Nevinson for membership of the New English Art Club and the Chelsea Arts Club on the grounds of his printmaking ability. Examples of his prints were also purchased from the Leicester Galleries in 1918 by writers such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Osbert Sitwell, St. John Irvine and Somerset Maugham (in 1921 Maugham would commission Nevinson to design a poster for his controversial play The Unknown – the poster proved even more contentious and was banned by the London Underground authorities). There is evidence to suggest, by the end of 1917, that Nevinson was making so many prints, not only to capitalise on their growing success within the market, and their appeal in the United States, but also because he found the very concentration required to make a print had a soothing effect on his tattered nerves. By the summer of 1918 he was moving away from war subjects, preferring to focus on the urban scene of London in monumental and tenebrously dramatic mezzotints such as From an Office Window (1918) and Limehouse (1918). He also found visits to the south coast therapeutic which resulted in some fine drypoint landscapes such as The Ebb Tide on the Camber (1918) in which the burin has been used to delicately suggest the meeting of earth, water and sky to create a scene whose tranquillity is the absolute antithesis to the devastation visited upon nature he had seen so recently in France and synthesised so strikingly in works such as the drypoint That Cursed Wood (1918) and the lithograph The Road from Arras to Bapaume (1918). Producing prints with war subjects in 1918 Nevinson was heartened by the positive reaction they had received in the United States – for example in an exhibition at the Seligman Galleries and Anderson Galleries in New York in March and December 1918 respectively. Oliver Brown, part-owner of the Leicester Galleries in London, at the urging of the great London-based American printmaker Joseph Pennell, helped arrange an exhibition of Nevinson's prints at the prestigious Keppel Galleries in New York. This opened to great acclaim towards the end of April 1919. American observers were particularly impressed by his ability to capture the excitement of the contemporary urban scene – for example in the large and imposing Wet Evening on Oxford Street (1919) depicting the famous shopping street shortly after the black out induced by wartime bombing raids had been lifted with the onset of peace. The New York Times in May 1919 almost laid down a challenge to Nevinson that he would be the modern artist to present the stimulating and vertiginous architectural reality of New York to itself. Over the summer of 1919 he produced a number of prints inspired by New York: the drypoint The Temples of New York and the mezzotint The Roof Garden. Both were included in his successful October 1919 'Peace Exhibition' at the Leicester Galleries. The former was interpreted as the quintessence of vibrant densely packed downtown New York and its teeming financial district – all the more relevant as the First World War had left Britain owing American banks nearly $4 billion – and the latter as the image exposing the distressing reality of the truly modern woman, the 'flapper' with her bobbed hair amidst the glitz and lights of the fashionable urban night club. Nevinson, this time accompanied by his wife Kathleen, visited New York again in October-November 1920 – for a second solo show which opened at the Bourgeois Galleries. This did not prove a financial success as the stock market was hit by a sudden panic while the British were not at all popular in the city owing to British military activity in the on-going Irish War of Independence (1919-21). From an Office Window, 1918 Page 32 Wet Evening on Oxford Street, 1919 Page 40

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