Best in show

“This is something of an early Futurist experiment. CRW Nevinson – perhaps the only British artist seriously interested in the movement at the time – was playing around with various styles, trying to find one of his own that would make people sit up and notice.

He painted in quite an angular and jagged fashion, using flat planes of colour. This is quite a threatening picture of a dockyard, an unwelcoming place after dark, and Nevinson wants the viewer to feel some of the menace.

There’s a real sense of him trying new things out as he went along. The conservator who worked on this picture reported a huge amount going on under the surface as Nevinson continually changed his approach. There’s some cracking and bubbling, as he wasn’t one to let paint dry as he worked and reworked his composition.

Everything was to come together, of course, a year or two later when Nevinson started to refine his art for his famous paintings of the Western Front.

But I have a rather personal connection with this picture. Before the interview for my current job, I researched The Atkinson’s oil painting collections on the BBC’s Your Paintings website to get a feel of the place and came across this image, which was then labelled ‘Landscape, unknown artist’.

I thought there and then it looked like a Nevinson but it wasn’t until after I was appointed and the painting finally came out of long-term storage that I was able to see it for myself and carry out some more investigations.

I found out that Nevinson had actually produced mezzotints of this subject and there was one of the same composition in the British Museum dated 1918.

While a lot of artists work out their ideas using prints and drawings, Nevinson did the reverse and planned his work on canvas before selecting some to reproduce in print form.

The last piece of the jigsaw was the conservator’s eventual discovery of the artist’s signature under badly discoloured varnish.

We then had to consider how best to exhibit the work and, as we continued to find other paintings that had been misattributed, we devised this Rediscoveries show with Nevinson as its focal point.

We were also having lots of works on paper conserved, the majority of which had not been shown for 40 or 50 years, so there is a good body of work from the Atkinson collection that people won’t have seen before.

In fact, we have just received an Esmée Fairbairn Foundation grant for further investigations of the paper work and we are confidently expecting some more surprises among the prints and drawings.”

Interview by John Holt. Rediscoveries runs at The Atkinson until 29 October