Christopher Nevinson: He Gained a Fortune but He Gave a Son (1918)

The Labour activists in Crewe who stalked the Tory dressed in top hats and tails hoped to cast him as a "Lord Snooty" figure. Their semiotics were imprecise. They were sporting grey toppers and standard wedding gear. The Beano toff wears a black top hat with a short bum-freezer jacket.

But at the back of their minds, perhaps, there was another, more imposing cartoon character: that archetype of traditional socialist imagery, the plutocrat. He, too, wore top hat and tailcoat. He was a vast figure, with a fat cigar in his mouth and a swelling bag of money over his shoulder.

He wasn't an aristocrat. He was a personification of the high bourgeoisie, a captain of industry, a merchant prince, wearing the late 19th century's universal costume of respectability. He used to be a prominent fixture of communist propaganda. He appeared in cartoons and posters, often accompanied by his allies in oppression, the militarist general and the obscurantist priest.

This image of the capitalist bogeyman is now almost defunct. It may still have life in Latin America or Iran, half-fused with the (also top-hatted) figure of Uncle Sam. In the West, it has lost its magic. True, a distant echo may be felt during our periodical waves of resentment against "fat cats", but it's no longer a part of our political mythology.

Has this stereotype ever been preserved in fine art? Well, it's to be found in caricatures by the Weimar artist Georg Grosz – and more surprisingly in a series of drawings, Social Turpitudes, made by the impressionist and anarchist Camille Pissarro. There is also an odd work by the English modernist, Christopher Nevinson. He Gained a Fortune but He Gave a Son was painted at the end of the First World War. It depicts a sad and hatless plutocrat.

The title tells the story. This man is a type, a contemporary hate figure, a war profiteer, who has done well from manufacturing armaments, something like that. But in the same war his son has been killed. This dramatic irony is what we're to read into this face – and feel our responses torn.

The "teutonic" bullet head, its rounded, jowly form clearly outlined, speaks the complacent brutality of this businessman. The shape of his body is an expanding A, which spreads prosperously off the bottom of the picture. And in the eyes, the set of the mouth, there's an expression that could register simply as hard, rigid, dull – but is also able to seem stunned, blank, frozen and ruined by grief. It isn't a subtle or sophisticated work. Its moral – heartlessness suffers heartbreak – is pretty corny. And its stagecraft is basic: glimpses of props to indicate the social milieu, a photo of the son in uniform on the mantelpiece, a clear area of wall to set the head in. The slanting lines of the coat and waistcoat, and the calculated indeterminacy of the facial expression, are its lively points.

But genre-wise, the picture may be unique. He Gained a Fortune but He Gave a Son is a fictional character study. Modern painting hardly ever does this. Even Victorian painting, which was so vigorously literary, refrained from making the psychology of a single imaginary individual into a picture's sole focus.

Nevinson's image looks down a road that art didn't take. It's more like a play, and this character might come from a contemporary drama by John Galsworthy. Its evenhandedness, finding sympathy for the unsympathetic, is very Galsworthian.

It even involves role-playing. Nevinson modelled his plutocrat on a real person. The sitter in the armchair was not a businessman but a domestic servant. And this picture has an alternative title, which quite upends its meaning and class connotations: Portrait of Henry Moat, Butler to the Sitwell Family.

The artist

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946) is mainly known as a First World War artist. He was a follower of the Italian Futurists, and a fellow-traveller of the English Vorticists. His images of the Western Front, showing ranks of soldiers and shell-bursts are made up of fragmented shards of colour and often look like anticipations of computer graphics. He had a celebrated London show in 1916. One painting, Paths of Glory, more realistic, showed a dead soldier tangled in barbed wire, and was banned by the War Office. After the war the energy went out of his art, though there are some weird slightly sci-fi visions of the modern city.