La Mitrailleuse

La Mitrailleuse is a painting by British Futurist artist C. R. W. Nevinson, made in 1915 while he was on honeymoon leave from service as an ambulance driver with the RAMC on the Western Front in the First World War.

In an article in The Burlington Magazine in 1916, artist Walter Sickert called the work "the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting".

The painting shows three soldiers in the trenches wearing metal Adrian helmets, one firing a machine gun.

The subjects are abstracted into angular geometric blocks of colour, becoming dehumanised components in a machine of death.

Nevinson later wrote: "To me the soldier going to be dominated by the machine ...