— Nash, the son of a successful lawyer, was born London. Nash was educated at St. Paul's School and the Slade School of Art, where he met Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, William Roberts and C. R. W. Nevinson. Influenced by the work of William Blake, Nash had one-man shows in 1912 and 1913.
On the outbreak Nash enlisted in the Artists' Rifles and was sent to the Western Front. Nash, who took part in the offensive at Ypres, had reached the rank of lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment by 1916. Whenever possible, Nash made sketches of life in the trenches. In May, 1917 he was invalided home after a non-military accident. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from his sketches to produce a series of war paintings. This work was well-received when exhibited later that year.
As a result of this exhibition, Charles Masterman, head of the government's War Propaganda Bureau (WPB) recruited Nash as a war artist. In November 1917 he returned to the Western Front where he painted several more pictures. Nash's work during the war included The Menin Road, The Ypres Salient at Night, The Mule Track (1918), A Howitzer Firing, Ruined Country and Spring in the Trenches. Nash was unhappy with his work as a member of War Propaganda Bureau. He wrote at the time: "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls." After the war Nash experimented with surrealism and abstract art. Nash also taught at the Royal College of Art and worked as a designer and book illustrator. During the Second World War Nash was employed by the Ministry of Information and the Air Ministry and paintings produced by him during this period include The Battle of Britain and Totes Meer.
— LINKS
— Wood on the Downs (1929) _ Nash helped organise and exhibited in the first surrealist exhibition of 1936. He is ranked as one of the greatest lyric artists of the English School - alongside Turner and Blake. It has been said of him that he was: Essentially a landscape painter, no artist has interpreted the beauty and rhythm of the English countryside as perfectly as he. Wood on the Downs is an articulate and monumental treatment of a vivid but unsensational subject. It is described in English Art & Modernism as a painting that summarises the first three decades of twentieth century British painting. There is an emphasis on a substantial paint surface, a feature of the best work of the Camden Town Group and a clear formal structure testifies to a continued recognition of the importance of Cezanne. The continental influences of Surrealism and Cubism were being gradually adopted into a context that became entirely appropriate to English painting.
— Northern Adventure (1929) _ This is the second version of a view from the window of Nash's flat in London which overlooked St. Pancras Station, across a vacant lot, containing an advertising hoarding. The work demonstrates Nash's increasing interest in architectural landscapes and in Surrealism. In the first version, oval windows line the station building. In Northern Adventure these have been removed, substituted for an outsized window which floats in space at an angle. This strange displacement of the window calls to mind the work of the Surrealists. It was a device used by the Italian artist, Giorgio De Chirico and its inclusion in Nash's work provides a reflection of the sky which is otherwise cut from the composition. In Nash's autobiography, 'Outline', his notes under the chapter titled 'Searching' read; "A new vision and a new style. The change begins. Northern Adventure and other adventures."
— Winter Sea (71x97cm) _ Muted shades of green and white are combined with black to create an impression of the sea at night. As well as suggesting moonlight, the palette of steely colors conveys a sense of somberness and cold. Concentrating on color and form, Nash represented nature as a pattern that verges on the abstract. The sharp, angular shapes of the waves evoke the forbidding nature of the winter sea.
— A Howitzer Firing (71x91cm) _ Along with Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, Nash (1889-1946) was one of the major British war painters who, like them, had been influenced by Cubism and Futurism prior to 1914. He signed up in 1914, was made a lieutenant in 1916, and fought near Ypres. An accident led to his repatriation in May 1917. He then set down to work from memory and from his sketches. Nash's paintings rely on detailed observation, from which he extracts the substance of his pictorial, lyrical and tragic effects. This is the case with this picture, where Nash is not content merely with a representation of the gun under camouflage nets. The initial flash of light and the reddening of the sky in contrast with the shadow of the foreground heighten the picture's expressiveness.
— Night Bombardment (1919, 183x214cm) _ Produced for the Canadian War Memorial, this painting is reminiscent of the work of Vallotton, in spite of the difference in the two painters' ages, training and experience of the war. In this commemorative picture, Nash combines figurative elements - mainly tree trunks, barbed wire and the dark entrance to a dugout - with geometrical elements - now curved, like craters and smoke etc., now angular, like the explosion, parapets and wooden frames. It reminds one of early Nevinson, which relies on the same pictorial system. However, faced with a monumental format, Nash introduces a further element, with the brutality of his earthy colors, the muddy grey-browns, the red of the barbed wire and the whitish lights, forming sharp contrasts against the backdrop of an opaque sky.
— The Ypres Salient at Night (1918, 71x91cm) — Void (1918, 72x92cm) — The Menin Road (1919, 183x317cm) _ The battle around Ypres lasted as long as the war itself. This appalling blood-bath was for the Commonwealth troops like Verdun for the French: an endless carnage in a marshy landscape where the wounded were swallowed up in the mud. These three paintings by Paul Nash, while showing how he moved from Cubo-Futurism towards descriptive naturalism, bear witness to the extreme violence of the destruction, in the wetlands, in the mutilated woodlands and around the town, itself destroyed. Void can be seen as the archetype of the Great War landscapes: not a soldier to be seen, abandoned lorries and guns, flooded trenches, a limp corpse among the shells and rifles, smoke and, in the distance a plane, either dropping bombs or falling to the ground, we cannot tell. On top of everything, it rains continually. There can be no more hope of coming bac