The Soul of the Soulless City by Christopher Nevinson ©Bridgeman Art Library

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was a British figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. Nevinson studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks and went on to become involved with the Italian Futurist Movement and briefly with Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre. After volunteering with the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1917 he was appointed an official war artists, moving from a powerful modernist style to a more realistic one as he attempted to capture the horrors of modern war. His 1930s cityscapes were well received though he remained, till his death, a controversial figure.