Paul Nash
War artist in both wars, and the painter who made the English landscape look like a dream someone else was having.
Paul Nash was born in London in 1889 and studied briefly at the Slade. He served at Ypres, was invalided home, and returned as an official war artist; We Are Making a New World and The Menin Road are the results, and the title of the first is bitter. Between the wars he moved towards Surrealism, exhibited in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, and painted the standing stones at Avebury, the Dorset coast and the flowering tree in a landscape that never quite behaves. In the Second World War he painted aircraft, most famously Totes Meer, a sea made from wrecked German planes. He died in 1946.
The oils are unique and comparatively few. The much larger part of the market is works on paper — watercolours, pen and ink drawings and wood engravings — and he was also a significant book illustrator and designer, which produces printed material of quite different standing. War subjects are held separately from the landscapes both in interest and in institutional demand. Watercolours are light-sensitive and many have been mounted and reframed. Signature is usually a simple Paul Nash with a date. The Tate holds substantial archive material.
If you own a work by Paul Nash
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