London, The Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Works by C.R.W. Nevinson, October - November 1919, no.4

Some very fine cracks are visible across the central band of the work. There is a small scratch and an artist's pinhole within the upper right corner. There is damp to the underside of the frame. Otherwise the work is in good overall condition. Under glass and held in a gilt wooden and plaster frame. Unexamined out of its frame. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no evidence of retouching.
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In the final stages of WWI and in the months that followed, Christopher Nevinson sought increasingly to move away from what he saw as the straightjacket of narrow modernist thinking. He claimed an artistic right to use differing vocabularies to suit each subject area-contending, in the introduction to his second exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, that a good painter could 'withstand the test of any technical method'. In the words of one historian, Nevinson post-war, 'divides the world up into units of experience, to each of which he assigns its appropriate art historical dialect'. D. Peters Corbett, The Modernity of English Art 1914-1930, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.152.

'February' was one of the range of new works featured in Nevinson's diverse 'Peace Show' of 1919 - his third individual event at the Leicester Galleries, and is amongst the first natural landscape works exhibited by the artsit. In 'February', the sombre and limited palette that had typified his painting during the war years has been replaced by vibrant colour - in keeping with a post-war stance that rejected the concerns of the avant-garde and, amongst other forceful assertions, 'declared for colour as an eternal that would outlast mere movements'. Ian Jeffrey, C.R.W. Nevinson: Artist celebrity, Cambridge, 1998.