Paths of Glory

The oil painting Paths of Glory was created by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson in 1917. Christopher Nevinson was a painter and printmaker, and studied for a year in 1912-1913, at the Académie Julian in Paris. He served in Frances Royal Army Medical Corps and under the Red Cross in 1914-1916 before being invalided out. He then used the experiences he confronted to paint his powerful paintings we see today. The title of the painting quotes Thomas Grays poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. Paths of Glory was painted in England after Richard was invalided from the war along with some of his other paintings like The Doctor and Returning to the Trenches. For me, the tone of this painting is dark, sad and tells a cold truth about how the battlefield is an unforgiving baron wasteland that brings men to their untimely demise. This painting gives me a deep feeling of sadness and a feeling of sympathy not only for the people dying on the field, but also for the families who learn their children’s lives have been taken from them. I feel that Nevinson hated the war and felt sad for the loss of people he called comrades, but also felt that the men and who died had the right to have their stories expressed. Maybe he also felt that people should know the sense of grimace the soldiers felt watching their friends die before them, of sow desolate the battlefield was in the eyes of broken men. The painting doesn’t portray the war entirely, but it does portray the war through what the soldiers are witnessing, and that’s the people they came to call brothers dropping with dead empty eyes.