Paths of Glory
C. R. W. Nevinson, 1917
Image not available: work still under copyright
Paths of Glory is a 1917 painting by the British artist Christopher Nevinson showing two British soldiers lying face down on a battlefield on the Western Front. Their bodies lie unburied in muddy ground, surrounded only by barbed wire and the debris of war. The title comes from a line in Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which holds that the paths of glory lead only to the grave. The painting takes that idea to its bleakest point: there is no visible heroism, only the end of the men. Nevinson, who had briefly served as a volunteer ambulance driver at the start of the war, had by then moved away from his earlier Modernist and Vorticist work and adopted a Realist style to show the horror of the conflict. He was working as an official war artist. The official censor of paintings and drawings in France banned the work, arguing that dead bodies would damage the war effort. When it appeared in the 1918 exhibition, it was covered by a brown paper strip bearing the word "censored". The controversy brought Nevinson considerable attention, and the Imperial War Museum eventually bought the painting.
- Painter
- C. R. W. Nevinson
- Date
- 1917
- Dimensions
- 457 × 609 cm
- Museum
- Imperial War Museum London, London Borough of Southwark
- Depicts
- casualty, corpse