Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson A.R.A (1889-1946)
Swooping Down on a Taube (Black 21; Leicester Galleries 28)
Lithograph, 1917, on Holbein wove paper, signed in pencil, from the edition of 200, published by the Stationery Office, London, as part of the series Britain's Efforts and Ideals Making Aircraft, with wide margins, framed

Image 402 x 300mm. (15 3/4 x 11 3/4in.); Sheet 478 x 390mm. (18 3/4 x 15 3/8in.)
Footnotes
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was one of the great printmakers of the early twentieth century, most celebrated as a chronicler of modern warfare and a master of multiple print techniques. He was held in high esteem by contemporaries such as Walter Sickert and Paul Nash for his acute eye for detail, feeling for composition and technical skill. His experiences as an ambulance driver and medical orderly at the Front imbued his work with a strong emotional intensity and his depictions are regarded as some of the most powerful images of World War I.

His first major exhibition held at Leicester Galleries in Autumn 1916 was a critical and commercial success and would lead to his commission as an official war artist in 1917. The Ministry of Information commissioned him to create six lithographs on the theme of Building Aircraft to be included in the propaganda series The Great War Britain's Efforts and Ideals. These works were taken on tour around the country to boost morale and were sold to raise funds for the war effort.

The Building Aircraft lithographs detail the process from manufacture, to assembly and finally to flight. Nevinson was particularly interested in aerial combat, which would play an important new role during the First World War and he produced three images of aircraft in flight. In preparation for the series, Nevinson was taken on his first flight in June 1917 and commented 'the whole newness of vision and the excitement of it infected my work and gave it an enthusiasm which can be felt'.

In Banking at 4,000 feet he uses variations in tone and steep diagonals to convey the drama and exhilaration of flight, which is literally a white-knuckle ride as indicated by the hand gripping the side of the aircraft. He invites the viewer to share the experience of being in the air by placing them in the cockpit.

Swooping down on a Taube depicts a British Sopwith Camel attacking a German Taube. Taube means dove and the plane was named for its bird-like profile. Nevinson conveys a sense of movement and tension using the sweeping arc of the plane's trajectory set against the strong diagonals, representing rays of light, emanating from the searchlights below. He added scratch marks through the crayon to create highlights which intensify the drama.

The immediacy of these images and the unusual viewpoints proved popular with visitors to the Fine Art Society exhibition, with one critic commenting that the artist 'contrives to make the visitor almost giddy' and another that he had 'the power of expressing sensations rather than visual facts'.