British artist C. R. W. Nevinson was born in London and studied
at the Slade School of Art. In 1912 he moved to Paris to study
at the Académie Julian, and is reputed to have shared a
studio there with Modigliani. Nevinson’s early encounter
with the war occurred in 1914-16 when he served with the Royal
Army Medical Corps and the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. Later,
in 1917, he was appointed an official war artist and returned
to France where he creatively approached his subjects by making
sketches from the air in planes and observation balloons. The
print of Nevinson’s War in the Air, reproduces his painting,
now in the Canadian War Museum, of an aerial confrontation involving
one of Canada’s most famous aviation heroes, Billy Bishop. | 