Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, A.R.A.

Sale, Sotheby's London, 12th November 1986, lot 80, where acquired by the present owner

Nevinson's Pan Triumphant is, at first sight, a most surprising image. The overlaying of subjects undeniably linked to the 'modern' age around the powerful head of the ancient god Pan seems an odd juxtaposition from an artist most often remembered for his rendition of the mud and death of Flanders in WWI, and yet it belongs to a small group of paintings in which Nevinson looks to deal with a far more wide-ranging critique of his times.

Having achieved huge popular acclaim for his wartime work, Nevinson took a curious position in the 1920s, often railing against the 'advanced' factions of the art world, whilst also advocating the exhilaration and achievement of modern cities, most especially New York. Even here though, his approach can be seen as contradictory, with one of his best and most well-known New York paintings being given the not entirely laudatory title of The Soul of a Soulless City (Tate, London). Indeed it is from such paintings that we see Nevinson drawing themes for Pan Triumphant, with the vertiginous skyscrapers looming tall above the road filled with vehicles below. The cityscape he envisages is criss-crossed with references to travel, with a train steaming across the foreground, perhaps having emerged from the tunnel to the right, and on the left a stream of travellers embark onto a large ocean-going liner. Across the whole are slivers of iron girders and chains, further suggesting industry and progress, and indeed these bring to the painting a feeling that is reminiscent of the urban photography of Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose work Nevinson would have been familiar with from his involvement in the Vorticist movement.

Yet this apparent paean to modernity is entirely tempered by the rising herm of Pan that fills the centre of the image. Pan, an ancient Greek god much associated with nature and fertility seems very much at odds with the images of the modern city around him, but in this it relates to the themes that Nevinson was exploring in other paintings of the time. Nevinson was, like many of his contemporaries, worried by the advance of the Fascist movements throughout Europe and in works such as The Twentieth Century (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) the conflict that has, and will be, visited on the world sweeps around a large monolithic figure, reminiscent of Rodin's Le Penseur. Compositionally similar to The Twentieth Century, the essence of Pan Triumphant would seem to follow a comparable line of thought, contrasting Man's headlong rush forward with an older and perhaps more important power.

The herm of Pan appears to be based on a sculpture from Nevinson's own garden at Steele's Studios in Belsize Park, and which is seen emerging from the undergrowth in the slightly earlier painting My Garden (Private Collection).