Looking at this rather serene interpretation of Welsh rural landscape, it’s perhaps difficult to imagine that the turmoil faced by the artist who painted it.

Yet Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was anything but serene. Born in 1889 into a progressive family – his mother was a women’s rights activist and his father a radical, campaigning journalist - he spent childhood and adolescence feeling neglected and an outsider.

“If my mother does happen to be in for a meal she is so engrossed in other things that she hardly hears and certainly never takes in a word I say,” he wrote later.

He felt further marginalised when his parents packed him to boarding school. In his autobiography he noted: “I went to a large school, a ghastly place from which I was rapidly removed as I had some sort of breakdown owing to being publicly flogged, at the age of seven, for giving away some stamps which I believed to be my own. I was not only described as a thief but as a fence. From this moment I developed a shyness which later on became almost a disease. During my sufferings under injustice a conflict was born in me, and my secret life began.”

Nevinson entered the Slade School of Art and began a series of relationships and friendships that were intense and often doomed. He was perceived as obtuse and difficult, and regarded as brilliant by his fellow students who included Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash but lacking in talent by others, including his tutor, Henry Tonks.

In 1912 Nevinson left the Slade and travelled to Paris, where he met up with two advocates of Futurism, a burgeoning Italian movement that emphasised speed, technology, youth and violence, and with them published a futurist manifesto. The Times was damning of the pamphlet. It commented: “Nevinson is a rebel in execution. He used to be a painter with a modest talent… Futurism, we are sure, is merely poison to him; and, if he has not lost his talent altogether, it will take him some time to recover it.”

Nevinson, like his parents, was a pacifist, and refused to fight when the First World War broke out, but instead volunteered for the Red Cross, and served on the Western front for two months, one week as an ambulance driver. But he had long enough at the front to paint Returning to the Trenches. Now, in the context of the human tragedy unfolding across the Channel, critics began to appreciate the stark, brutal Futurist style.

A bout of rheumatic fever meant he was invalided out, but in 1916 his work reached the attention of the War Propaganda Bureau, and he was sent back to the Western Front as a war artist, and painted another 60 pictures there.

While war raged, many critics and serving soldiers alike were huge admirers of his paintings. But post-armistice, the country lost its appetite for any reminder of the bloodiest war it had known.

Nevinson’s wife bore a son in 1919, but the child died after fifteen days. A comment made by Nevinson 18 years later gives a clue to his post-war state of mind. “I am glad I have not been responsible for bringing any human life into this world,” he said.

He continued to paint rural and urban landscapes – this one, Welsh Hills was probably painted between 1919 and 1925 - and wrote newspaper articles which were described as “salacious, with uncompromising savagery, yet enormously entertaining”. Although he became something of a socialite – Alec Waugh claimed Nevinson held the first cocktail party in Britain in 1924 – he was also hugely disliked by many who felt he exaggerated his own role in the war, and also found his developing right-wing and racist views unpalatable.

Following a series of strokes, he died at his Hampstead home on 7th October 1946.

n Welsh Hills features in the museum and art gallery’s current exhibition, British Art between the Wars.