A photograph of a picnic taken in 1912 inspired David Boyd Haycock to write A Crisis of Brilliance. The moment he saw the group of young artists from the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, gathered together for a formal picture, he knew he had to write about their experiences before and during the First World War.

David, who lives in Headington with his wife Susannah Wilson and their 17-month-old son Nathaniel, has already written a book on the artist Paul Nash, and the five artists he has featured in his book — Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash — have had countless biographies written about each of them – but no one has looked at those shared days at the Slade.

David is the first writer to look at their formative years at home and at art college, and the interrelationship between the most important British artists of the 20th century.

Their time at the Slade was described by their teacher, the formidable Henry Tonks, as the school’s ‘last crisis of brilliance,’ hence the book’s title.

The friends talked, loved and fought; they advised, admired, conspired and sometimes disparaged each other’s artistic ambitions and creations. They formed gangs and created or joined new movements, hung out in London’s most stylish cafes and restaurants and founded their own nightclub. They also slept with models and prostitutes — and finally their tempestuous lifestyles descended into obsession, murder and suicide.

It seems like a story crying out to be told, but several publishers rejected his idea, given that all the artists had been written up many times as individuals. Finally, after seven years David discovered a publisher who became as excited about the book as he was. There’s nothing that David, who is now a freelance cultural historian and writer, enjoys more than getting his teeth into serious research.

The project gave him an excuse to visit the Harry Ranson Research Centre, at Austin, Texas, where the artists’ letters and papers are kept. He also made full use of the Sackler Library at the Ashmolean, which holds a wonderful collection of art books, and the Bodleian Library. He was able to view the artists’ work at the Ashmolean, too, which he became very fond of. One of his favourites is Mark Gertler’s colourful oil painting Gilbert Cannon and his Mill, painted in 1916, which he is pictured beside.

“Research of this kind is very rewarding, as all the artists came up with superb bodies of work and kept diaries or journals.

“Spencer actually wrote more than a quarter of a million words in preparation for an autobiography which he never finished, so all I needed was out there. It was just a matter of seeking out and isolating those references to the Slade and their shared time together,” said David, who admits he is naturally curious and adores slowly building up a person’s life by reading personal papers.

“It’s like building a collage. It’s a matter of adding all the separate pieces until you have a complete picture,” he said.

David accepts that you have to go through a great deal of material to come up with the pieces you need: “It’s a matter of searching for exciting comments and those moments when they meet, found in unpublished papers, letters, diaries not seen anywhere else before. I found them all very inspiring,” he said.

“Take the comment made by Stanley Spencer, after visiting Gertler’s solo exhibition in 1923, for example. He had not expected to be impressed; yet came away saying: ‘Gertler has got passion, which means almost everything to me’.

“Writing this book has been a wonderful voyage of discovery, I have loved every minute,” he said.

l David Boyd Haycock will talk about A Crisis of Brilliance (Old Street, £20) at Blackwell’s on February 18 and will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 23.