Paul Nash was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer, and designer of applied art. He was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.
Background
Paul Nash was born on May 11, 1889, in London, United Kingdom. He was the son of a successful barrister, William Harry Nash, and his wife Caroline Maude, the daughter of a Captain in the Royal Navy. Paul Nash grew up in Earl's Court in West London, but in 1902 the family moved to Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire. It was hoped the move to the countryside would help Caroline Nash, who was increasingly showing symptoms of mental illness. The growing cost of Caroline Nash's treatment led to the house at Iver Heath being rented out while Paul and his father lived together in lodgings and his younger sister and brother went to boarding schools. On Valentine's Day 1910, aged forty-nine, Caroline Nash died in a mental institution.
Education
Paul Nash was originally intended for a career in the navy, following the path of his maternal grandfather, but despite additional training at a specialist school in Greenwich, he failed the Naval Entrance Examination and returned to finish his schooling at St Paul's School. Paul Nash considered the possibility of a career as an artist. After studying for a year at the South-Western Polytechnic (now Chelsea College of Arts) in Chelsea, he then enrolled at the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography (now the London College of Communication), in Bolt Court off Fleet Street, in the autumn of 1908.
Paul Nash spent two years studying at Bolt Court, where he began to write poetry and plays and where his work was spotted and praised by Selwyn Image. He was advised by his friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley, and by the artist William Rothenstein, that he should attend the Slade School of Art at University College, London. He enrolled in October 1910.
Paul Nash had shows in 1912 and 1913, sometimes with his brother John, largely devoted to drawings and watercolors of brooding landscapes. By the summer of 1914, he was enjoying some success and during that year he worked briefly at the Omega Workshops under Roger Fry and also worked with him on restoring the Mantegna cartoons at Hampton Court Palace. He was elected to the London Group in 1914.
On 10 September 1914, shortly after the start of World War I, Paul Nash reluctantly enlisted as a private for home service in the Second Battalion, the Artists' Rifles, part of the 28th London Regiment of Territorials. He began officer training in August 1916 and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. He was based at St. Eloi on the Ypres Salient at a relatively quiet time and although the area did come under shelling, no major engagements took place while he was there. However, on the night of 25 May 1917, Paul Nash fell into a trench, broke a rib, and, by 1 June, had been invalided back to London. A few days later the majority of his former unit were killed in an assault on a position known as Hill 60. Paul Nash considered himself lucky to be alive. While recuperating in London, he worked from sketches he had done at the Front to produce a series of twenty drawings of the war. The collection was well-received when exhibited in June that year at the Goupil Gallery. A further exhibition of these drawings was held in Birmingham in September 1917. As a result of these exhibitions, Christopher Nevinson advised Nash to approach Charles Masterman, head of the government's War Propaganda Bureau, to apply to become an official war artist. His commission as a war artist had been approved.
In November 1917 Paul Nash returned to the Ypres Salient as a uniformed observer with a batman and chauffeur. At this point, the Third Battle of Ypres was three months old and Paul Nash himself frequently came under shellfire after arriving in Flanders. He worked in a frenzy of activity and took great risks to get as close as possible to the frontline trenches. Despite the dangers and hardship, when the opportunity came to extend his visit by a week and work for the Canadians in the Vimy sector, Paul Nash jumped at the chance. He eventually returned to England on 7 December 1917.
When Paul Nash returned to England, he began working flat-out to have enough pictures ready for a one-man show in May 1918. Early in 1918, he began working in oils for the first time. The first oil painting he made was The Mule Track in which, amidst explosions from a bombardment, are the tiny figures of soldiers trying to stop their pack animals charging away along another zig-zagging duckboard. Switching to oils allowed Nash to make far greater use of color and the explosions in The Mule Track contain yellow, orange, and mustard shades.
When the war ended Paul Nash was determined to continue his career as an artist but struggled with periodic bouts of depression and money worries. Throughout 1919 and 1920 he lived in Buckinghamshire and in London where he made theatre designs for a play by J. M. Barrie. Along with several other artists, Nash became prominent in the Society of Wood Engravers and in 1920 was involved in its first exhibition. He became close friends with Eric Fitch Daglish whom he educated in the art of wood engraving and as a result, Daglish became a successful engraver. From 1920 until 1923 Paul Nash taught, on an occasional basis, at the Cornmarket School of Art in Oxford.
In 1921, after visiting his sick father, Paul Nash collapsed and, after a week during which he repeatedly lost consciousness, was diagnosed as suffering from 'emotional shock' arising from the war. To aid his recovery, the Nashes moved to Dymchurch which they had first visited in 1919 and where he painted seascapes, the seawall, and landscapes of Romney Marsh. Throughout 1924 and 1925 Paul Nash taught part-time at the Design School at the Royal College of Art. In 1924 he held a commercially successful exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. This allowed the Nashes to spend the winter near Nice and visit Florence and Pisa at the start of 1925 after which they moved home to Iden near Rye in Sussex.
In 1927 Paul Nash was elected to the London Artists' Association and in 1928 held another successful exhibition of his paintings at the Leicester Galleries whilst an exhibition of his wood-engravings was held at the Redfern Gallery the same year.
Paul Nash often worked in media other than paint. Throughout the 1920s he produced highly regarded book illustrations for several authors, including Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Paul Nash was one of the contributors of illustrations to the Subscriber's Edition of T.E. Lawrence's Seven pillars of wisdom, published in 1926. In 1930, he produced the dust jacket design for Roads to Glory, a collection of World War I stories by Richard Aldington.
In 1921 Paul Nash displayed textile designs at an exhibition at Heal's and in 1925 developed four fabric designs for the Footprints series sold by Modern Textiles in London. Later still, in 1933, Brain & Co in Stoke-on-Trent commissioned Nash and other artists to produce designs for their Foley China range which was showcased at the Modern Art for the Table exhibition at Harrods. In 1931, Margaret Nash gave him a camera when he sailed to America to serve as a jury member at the Carnegie International Award in Pittsburgh. Nash became a prolific photographer and would often work from his own photographs alongside his preparatory sketches when painting a work.
By April 1928, Paul Nash wanted to leave Iden but did not do so until after his father's death in February 1929, when he sold the family home in Iver Heath and bought a house in Rye.
In 1930 Paul Nash started working as an art critic for The Listener, and in his writings acknowledged the influence of the 1928 Giorgio de Chirico London exhibition and of the modernist works he had seen during a visit to Paris in 1930 at Léonce Rosenberg's gallery. He became a pioneer of modernism in Britain, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and surrealism throughout the 1930s. In 1933 he co-founded the influential modern art movement Unit One with fellow artists.
At the start of World War Two, Paul Nash was appointed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to a full-time salaried war artist post attached to the Royal Air Force and the Air Ministry. He was unpopular with the Air Ministry representative on the WAAC committee, partly because of the modernist nature of his work and partly because the RAF wanted the WAAC artists to concentrate on producing portraits of their pilots and aircrew.
Whilst still a salaried WAAC artist Nash produced two series of watercolours, Raiders and Aerial Creatures. Whilst the Air Ministry could appreciate the patriotic intent and propaganda value of those works, the Aerial Creatures series, with its anthropomorphic depictions of British aircraft, displeased the Air Ministry so much they insisted Nash's full-time contract was ended in December 1940. The Chairman of WAAC, Kenneth Clark was aghast at this development and in January 1941 the Committee agreed to put aside £500 to purchase works from Paul Nash on the theme of aerial conflict. He worked intermittently under this arrangement until 1944 to produce four paintings for WAAC. The first two of these were Totes Meer (Dead Sea) and the Battle of Britain.
The completion of Battle of Germany in September 1944 brought Paul Nash's public commitments to an end and he spent the remaining eighteen months of his life in, by his own words, "reclusive melancholy". In these final months, Paul Nash produced a series of paintings, including Flight of the Magnolia (1944), which he called 'Aerial Flowers' that combined his fascination with flying and his love of the works of Samuel Palmer.
During the final ten days of his life, Paul Nash returned to Dorset and visited Swanage, Corfe, Worth Matravers, and Kimmeridge Bay. Paul Nash died in his sleep of heart failure, as a result of his long-term asthma, on 11 July 1946, at Boscombe in Hampshire (now Dorset) and was buried on 17 July, in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Langley in Buckinghamshire (now Berkshire).
(Paul Nash's Photographs, Andrew Causey, 1973 (Tate Gall.))
1973
Fertile Image
1951
Dorset Shell Guide
1936
Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings
1949
painting
Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1918
Wire
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1919
The Ypres Salient at Night
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1918
Sunrise, Inverness Copse
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1917
We Are Making a New World
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1918
The Mule Track
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1918
The Menin Road
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1919
Defence of Albion
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1942
Battle of Britain
(collection of the Imperial War Museum, London)
1941
The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park
1940
Battle of Germany
1944
Membership
the London Group
,
London
1914
London Artists' Association
,
London
1917
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Asthmatic
Connections
In December 1914 Paul Nash married Margaret Odeh, an Oxford-educated campaigner for Women's Suffrage, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. Her father, Naser Odeh, had been the priest in charge of St Mary's mission and the pro-cathedral, Cairo. The couple had no children.
Paul Nash Masterpieces of Art
Paul Nash, the British landscape and Surrealist painter lived through both the First and Second World Wars. His depictions of these human catastrophes, with their damaged landscapes and broken machinery, are much remembered today. His painting life moved from representational landscapes, through to the Surrealist and symbolist styles of his later years where he experimented with abstraction and the everyday. He was regarded as a fine book illustrator and often created work for other graphic and theatrical forms. This new book offers 100 images, with an introduction to his art and contribution made by Nash to the cultural sophistication of the modern world.
2018
Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash
Best known for his collaborations with Neil Gaiman, McKean defied expectations with his stunning debut as writer and artist in Cages, winner of multiple awards for Best Graphic Album. Dark Horse proudly presents a new original graphic novel by the legendary artist based on the life of Paul Nash, a surrealist painter during World War 1. The Dreams of Paul Nash deals with real soldier's memoirs, and all the stories will add up to be a moving piece about how war and extreme situations change us, how we deal with that pain, and, in Nash's case, by turning his landscapes into powerful and fantastical psycho-scapes.
2016
Informal Beauty: The Photographs of Paul Nash
Informal Beauty explores the photographic works of Paul Nash (1889-1946), one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. Best known for his evocative paintings of war-ravaged landscapes and his quasi-Surrealist visions of the English countryside, Nash was also a consummate photographer, who believed that the camera could reveal aspects of the world that the painter could not.