Nash, Paul

Nash, Paul (1889–1946). English painter, book illustrator, writer, photographer, and designer, born in London, the son of a barrister. Nash was one of the most individual British artists of his period, taking a distinguished place in the English tradition of deep attachment to the countryside (he saw himself as a successor to Blake and Turner) whilst at the same time responding imaginatively to European modernism. The most important part of his training was at the Slade School, 1910–11, after which he worked briefly for Roger Fry's Omega Workshops. At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted with the Artists' Rifles and in 1917 was posted to the front at Ypres. He was invalided out after a few months, but he returned to France the same year as an Official War Artist (a result of the success of his exhibition ‘Ypres Salient’ at the Goupil Gallery, London, 1917). The paintings he produced include some powerful views of the pitted and shattered landscape of No Man's Land that rank among the most famous images of the conflict (We Are Making a New World, Imperial War Museum, London, 1918). He held a second successful exhibition, ‘The Void of War', at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1918, and although his later career was varied and distinguished, many critics think that his First World War paintings mark the summit of his achievement.

During the 1920s and particularly the 1930s Nash was influenced by Surrealism (above all by de Chirico, an exhibition of whose work he saw in London in 1928), and he often concentrated on mysterious aspects of landscape. For much of this time he lived in rural areas ( Kent, 1921–5; Sussex, 1925–33; Dorset, 1934–5), basing his work on scenes he knew well but formalizing and imaginatively transforming them, sometimes almost to the point of abstraction (Landscape from a Dream, Tate Gallery, London, 1937–8). He continued to be involved in the London art world, however; as well as teaching at the Royal College of Art, 1924–5 and 1938–40, he was the prime mover behind the formation of the avant garde group Unit One in 1933 and he helped to organize and exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. During the Second World War he was again an Official War Artist, even though at the outbreak of war he was already very ill with the asthmatic condition that killed him. His Second World War paintings are not generally as highly regarded as those of the First, but they include one acknowledged masterpiece, Totes Meer (Dead Sea) (Tate Gallery, London, 1940–1), which shows shot-down aircraft with their wings looking like undulating waves. Nash based it on a dump of wrecked planes he saw near Oxford, where he was living at this time, and he wrote that ‘a pervasive force, baffled yet malign, hung in the heavy air'. His final paintings, produced when he was very weak, were of flowers.

Nash also designed scenery, fabrics, and posters, and he was considered to be one of the finest book illustrators of his day, working in pen and ink, lithography, and wood engraving, sometimes in colour. He regarded his illustrations to an edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial (1932) as his most successful work in this field. In 1936 he published a guidebook to Dorset in the Shell Guide series, and two collections of his writings appeared posthumously: Outline (a fragment of autobiography with some letters and essays) in 1949, and Poet and Painter (his correspondence with the poet Gordon Bottomley) in 1955. A collection of his photographs taken for use in his paintings was published as Fertile Image in 1951.

His brother John Nash (1893–1977) was also a landscape painter and an illustrator, excelling in meticulous flower drawings for botanical publications. Like Paul he was an Official War Artist in both world wars. His work is well represented in the Tate Gallery.