The Apple Orchard - The Bath Road

Nevinson’s landscapes are some of his most appealing paintings, and this depiction of an orchard in bloom is especially captivating. He began to paint landscape after 1917, but many of the best date from 1925-30, which is perhaps when this painting dates from. (We know he was in and around Bath in 1926, sight-seeing with his wife and father, so this year can be tentatively ascribed to Apple Orchard.) A welcome antidote to his wartime pictures with their ethos of ‘there is no beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness’, Nevinson’s landscapes show the gentle side of peacetime rurality as well as a more contemplative side to his personality, and were unexpectedly popular. As Osbert Sitwell observed in 1947: ‘Nevinson painted with his heart, no less than with head and hand.’ It seems likely that Apple Orchard was painted from Nevinson’s mobile studio, a specially adapted motor caravan he drove around the countryside attracting much attention in his typically flamboyant fashion.

A.L.