Leeds Art Fund

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Slade School of Art in London was the leading establishment in England for teaching drawing and painting. Its students included some of the most important British artists of the first half of the twentieth century, including David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, William Roberts, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth.

Based on A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009) and the accompanying 2013 summer exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, this lecture by author David Boyd Haycock explores the extraordinary story of these young artists’ interlocking lives, and their artistic education and development during one of the most exciting periods in modern British art, culminating in the horror and drama of the First World War.