Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, A.R.A.

Sir Alexander Park Lyle and thence by family descent to the present owner

C. R. W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice, Methuen Publishers, London, 1937, illustrated (unpaginated).

Original canvas. There are some frame abrasions along each edge and a small hole in the window in the upper right quadrant. There are faint signs of craquelure across the canvas, mainly in the centre and upper right quadrant. There is a small uneven area with craquelure below the girl near the lower right corner, which corresponds to a repaired hole. There are a few minor flecks of paint loss to the figure in the right hand doorway, and two or three small and isolated spots of staining across the surface. Ultraviolet light reveals an opaque varnish. There are retouchings along the left, right and upper edges. There is an area of retouching in the lower right corner, corresponding to the repaired hole, and further retouchings to the right of the right-hand doorway. There are also some flecked retouchings in this area which correspond to some craquelure. There are additionally a few isolated spots of retouching across the canvas. Held in a painted plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Nevinson's exploration of urban themes in the 1920s and 1930s offers us some remarkable images of London, be that the vivid and bustling Fleet Street of Among the Nerves of the World of 1928-30 (The Museum of London) or the atmospheric Battersea Twilight (Private Collection). Unlike his paintings of New York which tend to concentrate on the spiralling architecture and modernity of an active metropolis, Nevinson's paintings of London hone in on elements of the city that are as varied as the place itself. Thus we witness the stream of commuters under umbrellas and the ubiquitous red buses of The Strand by Night (Bradford Art Galleries and Museums), the rising mists over the River Thames as strings of barges move along the waterway still then at the hub of Empire or a family at leisure in their neat garden in his etching, Suburbia, of 1924.

Any London Street offers us a grittier view of the city, the backdrop of a patchwork terrace of small dwellings that could be in almost any district of the city, north or south of the river, between the wars. Clearly the district has fallen a little in its social standing, and whilst a vestige of respectability is retained where the front steps are still scrubbed and the windows cleaned, the children playing in the road and on the pavements give a vitality but also a rawness to the image. A lone male figure passes along the road, head bowed, perhaps a reminder of the huge levels of unemployment in the age of the Depression, seemingly impervious to the games and scuffles around him. Nevinson was always well aware of other contemporary currents, and one cannot escape from the sense of reportage, even a nod towards the photography of artists such as Bill Brandt and Humphrey Jennings or the documentary images resulting from the Mass-Observation project. In the foreground a young girl, who exhibits exactly the same kind of cocky rudeness displayed in his marvellously observed The Charlady's Daughter (Private Collection), pulls a face right at us, making us aware of our position as both observer and intruder into this district.

By the deftest of touches, Nevinson takes us right to a place and makes it real. Although we are given no clue to the actual location, this is in fact immaterial; it is, as the title makes clear, Any London Street, a place that is both specific and generic but nonetheless as much part of the experience of any Londoner as any of his images of the great landmarks of the city.