Paul Nash

British painter

• Born: May 11, 1889
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: July 11, 1946
• Place of death: Boscombe, England

Nash created landscape paintings that aptly depict the destruction of World Wars I and II and are among the best in the English tradition.

Early Life

Paul Nash was born to William Harry Nash, a lawyer whose family had for generations been involved in agriculture, and Caroline Maud Nash, the daughter of a naval captain. The Nash family would later include another son and a daughter; Paul’s younger brother, John N. Nash, was also to enjoy a successful career as a painter. Paul Nash was an imaginative child who loved both the natural world and the descriptions of it that he found in fairy tales, such as those by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. These early impressions of nature were reflected in his artwork throughout his career. Interestingly, Nash was concerned primarily with places and the inanimate things he found there (especially trees and rocks); he seldom included people in his drawings and paintings. Only some evidence of man’s existence was seen in his art, such as fences, paths, walls, and later the machinery of war.

Nash’s formal education began in January of 1898, when he enrolled at Colet Court, a preparatory school for boys, wishing to enter St. Paul’s School eventually. He was an anxious and nervous child, a disposition he inherited from his mother. A target for bullies at school, he disciplined himself in adulthood to display a confident, almost diffident, demeanor, sometimes mistaken for aloofness.

Because Nash’s mother was in very poor health, the family moved from London to a country home, Iver Health, near Langley, at the end of 1901. Nash would live there for many years, later drawing on the natural scenery of the heath for imagery in his paintings. In the fall of 1903, he entered St. Paul’s School, but deficiencies in mathematics hurt his progress as a student. His interest at this time was in school theatrical productions, for which he designed some stage scenery. He was also proficient at expressing himself in writing. When Nash was graduated in July of 1906, he was still undecided about a future career.

Since Nash had always enjoyed art, his father encouraged him to enroll in an art school. Nash first attended the Chelsea Polytechnic School in December of 1906, where he began illustrating his favorite books to practice his drawing. In the fall of 1908, he transferred to the London County Council School to prepare for employment as a commercial artist. He studied there for the next two years.

Through the influence of a prominent art scholar, William Rotenstein, Nash was encouraged to attend the prestigious Slade School of Art at the University of London, which he entered in the fall of 1910. There he became friends with a fellow student, Ben Nicholson, who would also have a successful career as an artist. During his tenure at the Slade School, Nash fell under the powerful influence of the works of two great artists and writers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Blake. Nash was especially fascinated with the imagery each man used in his works; the sun, the moon, and stars began to loom large in his own imagination.

Life’s Work

Nash’s first drawings as a maturing artist were of landscapes that have a poetic and sometimes haunting atmosphere about them. Some of these works are Vision at Evening (1911), in which a face peers out of the sky, and Pyramids in the Sea (1912), in which a decorative style of painting is employed, predominantly in blue tones.

The most important influence on Nash’s early works, however, came when World War I began. Although he first enlisted as a home guard (for service in England only), Nash was sent to France in early 1917 as an official war artist. Early in the war, on December 17, 1914, Nash had married Margaret Theodosia Odeh, the daughter of an Anglican minister. His letters to her from the front, in 1917, display his great ability as a descriptive writer; they abound in startling details of war scenes. These same horrifying scenes were to become the substance of Nash’s first important paintings and drawings. All of his works, from World War I on, display exceptional merit in their depiction of the phantasmagoric imagery of its battles. Among Nash’s very best pieces from this era are Sunrise: Inverness Copse (1918), Dawn: Sanctuary Wood (1918), and Landscape: Year of Our Lord 1917 (1918).

The powerful impact that trench warfare made on Nash actually hurt his ability to depict other subjects in his paintings on his return to England. Art critics often consider the 1920’s to be one of his least successful decades as an artist. The landscapes he then produced tended to focus on Dymchurch, an area of England he visited often. Nash’s interests, however, were also diversified in this decade; he was employed as a designer of stage scenery and costumes, primarily by his good friend, the playwright Gordon Bottomley. Nash also worked as a book illustrator at this time, drawing for Ford Madox Ford’s Mr. Bosphorus and the Muses (1923).

Unfortunately, Nash’s private life was affected by severe trauma all through the 1920’s. His wife was almost constantly in poor health, and his father failed in strength and died in 1929. Nash himself was to suffer from debilitating asthma for most of his adult life. Attacks of breathlessness would leave him deeply fatigued, and he consulted many doctors to find a cure for his suffering. There was no cure, however; he would have to conserve his strength and periodically rest at nursing homes. Throughout all of these personal trials, Nash maintained some sense of humor. He had a sharp wit that could hurt his enemies, but a kindly and generous nature was at his core. He was a very hard worker despite his illness.

The 1930’s marked some new developments in Nash’s life. He and his wife moved to a new home in Rye in December of 1930. In the next year they traveled to the United States, where Nash was a judge for the annual art awards presented by the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. Despite his severe asthma attack in 1933, Nash remained active in several areas of the art world. In early 1933, he founded a group of painters, sculptors, and architects known as Unit One. They were a selection of some of England’s finest artists of the era, all working outside the mainstream of their fields. The membership of Unit One included Edward Wadsworth, Edward Burra, John Bigge, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Wells Coates. In April of 1934, they held their first exhibition of works at the Mayor Gallery in London; these pieces later toured major English cities. The great diversity of interests and of artistic styles that the members of Unit One pursued, however, soon led them to disband, in early 1935.

Nash also worked as an art critic throughout the 1930’s and after. In December of 1930, he became the art critic of the Week-end Review, and in April, 1931, he first wrote for The Listener, alternating his essays with those of Herbert Read. Nash was a successful practitioner of journalistic writing. His fastidiousness in all areas of his life led him to choose his words with great care so as to use their fullest meanings.

Besides being meticulous in the details of his work, Nash was an impeccably elegant dresser with an eye for fine apparel. Consequently, he cut a handsome, aristocratic figure. His eyes were intensely blue, his mouth full and expressive.

From the late 1920’s and continuing into the 1930’s, Nash had also been involved in producing patterns for several commercial projects. He designed book jackets for publishers, printed fabrics for clothiers, and did glass and ceramic designs for china companies. Nash made his greatest contribution to the decorative arts with his book illustrations of this period; his drawings for a one-volume set of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus, issued in 1932, are considered to be particularly outstanding.

Nash even found time in the 1930’s to begin a new hobby, photography. He used his camera to record and recall the scenes in nature that he wished to employ in his art. Nash had usually first sketched the scenes that he would later develop into oil paintings or watercolors. With his camera, he could instead photograph places or items from which he would work at length in his studio. During this period, Nash became fascinated by stones and used them as images in his paintings. He also seems to have felt some influence from Surrealism. He even exhibited in the Surrealists’ first international show, held in London in 1936. The Surrealists moved Nash to use poetic elements and his own fantasies in his paintings; he also was much taken by folklore and myths during this period. All these various influences resulted in such pictures as Forest (1932), Strange Coast (1934), and Wood Sea (1937).

When World War II began in 1939, Nash was again asked to paint as an official war artist. He was assigned to the air force, but his asthmatic condition was so debilitating that doctors repeatedly refused him permission to fly. Consequently, all of his depictions of combat flying and aerial warfare were made from the ground. Nevertheless, Nash produced a very powerful, moving group of battle pictures in the early 1940’s. His relentless pursuit of detail caused him to study in earnest all the pictures and designs of British and German airplanes that his government provided for him.

As was the case in World War I, Nash’s perception of the terrible waste and destruction of war resulted in some very impressive works during World War II. Among his best paintings on this subject are The Battle of Britain (1941) and Totes Meer (1941). The latter was the result of his close observation of a large dumpsite for wrecked airplanes near Oxford. It is an evocative picture that shows humanity’s deadly power at work, without any people being present in the scene; only their violent, broken machinery evokes their presence for the viewer.

Among Nash’s last works are some landscapes that concentrate on his favorite images of the sun and the moon, but with a new element added. Nash was interested in fungi late in his career. He painted a series of pictures centering on the fungus, which are regarded by critics as among his best pieces. These works include Landscape of the Red Fungus (1943), Landscape of the Brown Fungus (1943), and Landscape of the Puff Ball (1943). The symbolic effect in these landscapes is twofold: The fungi are living, like all plant life, but they also have a death-bearing quality, perhaps evoked by the poison they produce. Nash was, at this time, facing his own death: His asthmatic condition had steadily worsened in the 1940’s. In the last winter of his life he suffered from pneumonia, and he died in the night, on July 11, 1946.

Significance

Nash produced a rather wide range of works during his career. He painted some of the finest and most innovative landscapes in a nation that reveres such painting. These pieces alone would be sufficient to secure for him a permanent place in British art history.

Nash was also an advocate of better economic opportunities for artists. He was conscious of the harsh struggles many of his fellow artists had to face, and his concern led to his involvement, albeit briefly, in Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops and his own Unit One. Allied to this commitment was his interest in promoting the integrity of the arts in daily life in England. He worked with bookbinders, poster printers, glassblowers, china makers, and clothing manufacturers (among others) to advance the design and quality of products in his native land.

Bibliography

Bertram, Anthony. Paul Nash: The Portrait of an Artist. London: Faber & Faber, 1955. Bertram provides a very detailed discussion of Nash’s life and career. He draws on Nash’s letters and biographical writings to a great extent. He also discusses the influences on and the products of each of the artist’s various periods. A listing of Nash’s paintings is included.

Causey, Andrew. Paul Nash. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Causey emphasizes the eclectic aspects of Nash’s style and discusses the greatness of his landscapes. This thorough study also shows how personal events and other influences affected Nash’s art. Includes color photographs and a bibliography.

Eates, Margot, ed. Paul Nash: Paintings, Drawings, and Illustrations. London: Lund Humphries, 1948. This book contains several essays on Nash’s art by such scholars as Herbert Read, John Rothenstein, and Richard Seddon. Eates also provides a chronology of Nash’s life and a bibliography. The text is amply illustrated by twenty color pictures and more than one hundred in black and white.

Friedenthal, Richard, ed. Letters of the Great Artists, from Blake to Pollock. New York: Random House, 1963. In this second volume of a two-volume set, the author has included two of Nash’s letters to his wife from the front in 1917. A biographical sketch of Nash also appears here, as well as some of his war pictures.

Haycock, David Boyd. Paul Nash. London: Tate, 2002. Focuses on Nash’s antiwar paintings. Haycock maintains that in these paintings, Nash found the true subject for his talent and imagination.

Nash, Paul. Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1949. Nash began writing this book in 1938, but he died before he could complete his life story; the narrative ends in 1913. His wife added to this, mainly selections from Nash’s wartime letters to her. Herbert Read provides a good preface, and several of Nash’s pictures are reproduced here, too.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Writings on Art. Selected, with an introduction, by Andrew Causey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Includes Nash’s essays from 1919 until 1946, with the majority dating from the 1930’s.

Ritchie, Andrew C. Masters of British Painting, 1800-1950. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1957. This is a catalog of paintings that accompanied an exhibition in the fall of 1956. Ritchie provides a brief but informative text discussing the excellent pictures here, including some by Nash. Ritchie also discusses Nash’s life and the influences on his art.

Rothenstein, John. Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Rothenstein, a major British art scholar, gives a very good analysis of Nash’s career. Rothenstein’s style is lively, penetrating, and clear; his analyses are complemented by revealing anecdotes.

Webb, Brian, and Peyton Skipwith. Design: Paul Nash, John Nash. Easthampton, Mass.: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2006. An introduction to the careers of Nash and his brother, John.