Footnotes

Provenance
With Dicksee & Co, Glasgow, 1941
Private Collection, U.K., thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, 5-9 May 1941, cat.no.240
Possibly London, Royal Academy of Arts, The Second United Artists' Exhibition in aid of H.R.H. The Duke of Gloucester's Red Cross and St. John Ambulance Fund, 1 January-7 March 1942, cat.no.72 (as September Morn)

The Peaceful Rhythms of the Downs was one of six pictures Nevinson exhibited as an A.R.A. at the Royal Academy in 1941, and the only one not directly referring to wartime themes and events. The title, however, is telling, suggesting the contemporary viewer might find consolation, looking away from war to its opposite, in a 'peaceful' downland vista located in an area close to Amberley in West Sussex. The eye is led up the track on the left to a lone tree, a pivotal point, from which fields, slopes and lines of trees fan out. The landscape is variously worked but devoid of figures, this second world war having created a shortage of land workers, as had the first. There are levels of rhythm in the lines and groups of trees: choppy, toothed, islanded or sinuous, as along and shouldering the crest of the down, which Nevinson evokes with, in T.W. Earp's phrase, 'a lyric fervour'. Nevinson, so much the war artist, found peace in such a landscape, as he did in listening to classical music. The painting's colouring is quiet, yet embracing many shades of green, and earth and straw colours, below a sky of light, passing clouds. In wartime, pensive and melancholic, Nevinson built here on many years of depicting the English landscape, to reach an apotheosis of his art.

The Peaceful Rhythms of the Downs was one of a number of Nevinson's landscape paintings reproduced full-size by the Medici Society. Other titles, of a similar size, included Spring in Suffolk and After the Storm. This meant the images reached an audience beyond the galleries and exhibiting societies. The Peaceful Rhythms of the Downs became a print in the 1940s, and the print can be glimpsed on the wall of an apartment in the 1947 film The Dream of Olwen, also known as While I Live (director, John Harlow).

We are grateful to Christopher Martin for his assistance in compiling this catalogue entry.