Watercolour over pencil, 10 by 14 ins (25.5 by 35.7 cm)

Nevinson constantly returned to France throughout his career. Having left the Slade he studied at the Academie Julien and he spent time sketching in France in breaks from his gruelling work on the Western Front during the First World War. One town he was to visit at this date was Boulogne (see C.R.W.Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice, Methuen, 1937, p.129) and he was to return there in the mid 1920s when he painted “A Boulogne Window”, a dynamic view of the town’s bustling harbour viewed from above. That work is a good example of the cubist inspired urban landscapes that are now counted amongst his greatest post-war paintings. The present work is more than a mere topographical record of Boulogne’s great Gothic church and conveys a theme constant in many of Nevinson’s great works – that of observing a bustling crowd or group of individuals involved in their daily routine.