La Mitrailleuse (1915)

La Mitrailleuse (1915) - depicting soldiers, dead and alive, in their Adrian helmets, and a machine gun in use (meaning of the French title) - was described by Walter Sickert when it was initially exhibited at the Allied Artists’ Association show at the Grafton Galleries in March in 1916 as ‘the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting’. It was painted in the Futurist style Nevinson had adopted before the First World War in London while he was on leave from his duties as an ambulance driver for the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) at the Front. It was exhibited for a second time at the Leicester Galleries, London in the autumn of 1916 when it was purchased by the Contemporary Art Society (In his autobiography Paint and Prejudice (1937) Nevinson said La Mitrailleuse was gifted to the CAS by an anonymous American donor which was also stated in the Bourgeois Galleries show in New York in 1920 although there is no documentary evidence for this). It was presented to the Tate Gallery in 1917 – the first work of the artist to enter a UK public collection but by 1925 the artist was requesting that this picture should no longer be kept on view, having experienced the sheer inhumanity of warfare first hand.

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