Paul Nash on the Walls (of Piano Nobile)

My Paul Nash exhibition opened on 8 October at Piano Nobile Gallery in Holland Park, north-west London, and it runs until the 22nd November. This below is my introduction written for the catalogue, beautifully produced by Graham Rees Design. There's a lovely film of the show on youtube, made by my good friend Jon Adams.

Paul Nash, The Orchard (1914), pencil and watercolour: private collection

‘ANOTHER LIFE, ANOTHER WORLD’

When the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914 Paul Nash was in his mid-twenties and gradually establishing a reputation as a painter of subtle watercolours of trees, gardens and landscapes – an understated modernist who nevertheless retained links with the English Romantic tradition. Sent to the Western Front in early 1917 as a junior infantry officer, Nash was invalided home after a night-time fall into a trench – an accident that quite probably saved his life. When he returned to the battlefields of Passchendaele later in the year it was as an Official War Artist. If 2^nd Lieutenant Nash had been killed in action – as could so easily have happened – his reputation today would be as a lost young watercolorist.

But Nash survived, and produced some of the greatest watercolours and oil paintings of the war that was to have ended wars. In the opinion of the critic John Rothenstein, writing in the 1950s, what Nash experienced in the wastes of Flanders in the winter of 1917 ‘made him an artist as decisively as the scenes of his boyhood by the River Stour made Constable an artist.’ Before the Great War, Nash had

seemed to be an artist of modest range … There can be little doubt that had he been destined to take his place among the unnumbered thousands who died in the Ypres Salient he would have been unremembered, but surviving the bitter desolation of the place immeasurably deepened his perceptions … The impact upon the imagination of a [man like] Paul Nash of this vast desolation of tortured country, churned to mud, pitted with shell-craters, the grass scorched and trampled, was of the utmost violence. An artist accustomed to handle nature more arbitrarily, or familiar with her harsher aspects, might have taken the spectacle less hardly, but he, who had treated her with such tender respect, was pierced by a sense of outrage.[1]

As for so many in his generation, Nash’s life fell into two halves: a division demarcated by the Great War of 1914—18. When he was invited to write his autobiography in the late 1930s, after an early flourish, he struggled to complete his life’s story. By July 1945, as he knowingly entered his final months, Nash wrote and told his old friend, Gordon Bottomley,

When I came to look into the early drawings I lived again that wonderful hour. I could feel myself making those drawings – in some ways the best I ever did to this day. And because of this I suddenly saw the way to finish my ‘life’ … I feel I could make a complete thing by taking it up to 1914 – just up to the war. After that it was another life, another world.[2]

* * *

Paul Nash was born in London on 11 May 1889, the eldest of three children in a moderately prosperous middle-class family. They moved to the countryside in 1901, settling at Iver Heath, near Langley, Buckinghamshire, and it is clear from both his contemporary letters and the memories of his childhood recorded in his autobiography, Outline, that early in his life Nash developed an acute sensitivity to landscape, and the mysterious ambiance of certain places. This feeling for place and for nature became one of the defining characteristics of his personality, and his art – for the two were indelibly linked.

Educated at St Paul’s School, London, Nash was seventeen when what he called ‘the long and complicated purgatory’ of his school life ended. ‘I emerged from it impaired in body and spirit,’ he later wrote, ‘more or less ignorant and equipped for nothing.’[3] He had failed to pass the exams that would have launched him on the Royal Navy career his parents had intended, and his father wisely ignored suggestions his son find employment in a bank. Though an uncle in the army ‘seemed to have painted as many water-colours as the family could hang on its drawing-room walls’, and Paul and his brother John had enjoyed regular ‘bouts of smearing and daubing with cheap water-colours,’ art was not something that had featured strongly in the Nash household.[4] Yet when Paul proposed that he might earn his living ‘as a black and white artist or illustrator … no objection was raised. In fact, everything was done to launch me on this precarious career.’[5]

            In December 1906 he began taking classes at Chelsea Polytechnic. Then, in the autumn of 1908, he started evening classes at the London County Council’s School of Photo-engraving and Lithography at Bolt Court, just off Fleet Street. ‘The whole place had an atmosphere of liveliness and work’, he later recalled. ‘You were there to equip yourself for making a living. It suited me.’ Here it was expected that he would lay his foundations as ‘a slick and steady machine for producing posters, show cards, lay-outs and other more or less remunerative designs’. Instead, he found himself falling under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, as his work from this period clearly reveals [fig. – ].[6] Imitating Rossetti – and another early artistic influence, William Blake – Nash often accompanied early works with words of poetry; via Blake he discovered Samuel Palmer, who proved another important influence, lending much of the mystical and magical to Nash’s sometimes visionary creations. On being awarded a prize for a drawing by the artist William Rothenstein, he was advised to go the Slade School of Art, at University College London.

Founded in 1871, the Slade had made its name as a place where drawing was uppermost, and the life-class ruled the curriculum; former students had included Gwen and Augustus John, William Orpen, Spencer Gore, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Ambrose McEvoy. When Nash arrived in the autumn of 1910 he confidently showed his drawings to Henry Tonks, the School’s famously caustic master of drawing. ‘In cold discouraging terms he welcomed me to the Slade,’ Nash later recorded. ‘It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, was likely to derive much benefit.’[7] Nash’s fellow students were among the finest that would ever study there, and included Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, C.R.W. Nevinson, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth and Dora Carrington.

            Unlike most of his contemporaries at the Slade, Nash had no ambition to paint in oil. His chosen media were all paper based: pen and ink, pencil, chalk and watercolour. Trees, landscapes and gardens would be his absorbing subjects: although the human figure occasionally made an appearance – as in the watercolour commonly called Barbara in the Garden [fig. –] – it proved a struggle. It was partly for this reason he lasted little more than a year at the Slade. Nevertheless, he enjoyed early success with a small exhibition held at the Carfax Gallery in November 1912 – a show that included A Lane in Blue [fig. –], The Three [fig. –] and Falling Stars [fig. –]. Subsequently, an introduction to the collector and patron Edward Marsh helped open Nash’s eyes for the first time to the work of the great English landscape painters, in particular John Sell Cotman, John Crome and Richard Wilson.[8] (Constable, however, was of no interest to him: ‘I did not want to paint landscape like Constable’, he recorded in Outline).[9] Through his acquaintance with Carrington, Gertler, Spencer and other young contemporaries, he was also exposed to the exciting and disturbing movements in modern art: Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. None of these greatly interested him, though he was amused when in December 1913 he and his brother were invited to exhibit alongside the arch-modernists Nevinson, Wadsworth, Bomberg and Wyndham Lewis at an exhibition in Brighton.[10]

Of the critics who knew Nash personally, it was, perhaps, William Rothenstein’s son, John, who made the best assessment of the artist’s early career. For Rothenstein, in the years up to the summer of 1914, Nash’s work had ‘assumed a traditional character’. He was uncertain which painters in the long tradition of English watercolourists had ‘pointed the way’, for Nash

was too personal an artist to imitate an old master, but what he did was to assimilate something of the spirit of Girtin, Cotman and others, and to evolve a free contemporary version of traditional idioms. He seemed destined to follow closely, with intelligence and taste, a conventional course. English landscape, his chosen subject, he represented in its most park-like aspect: green lawns, formal hedgerows and farms and the elegant intricacies of lofty elms were features which he dwelt on with a peculiar tenderness and comprehension. In the best of these clearly drawn, firmly if lightly constructed, brightly but coolly coloured water-colours he struck an original note.[11]

Then, in August 1914, came the War. Nash was with his future wife, Margaret Odeh, visiting Gordon Bottomley in Lancashire, when the news broke. They returned to London, ‘and when we got out at St Pancras station’, Margaret later recalled, ‘we found small boys marching down the street with toy drums which they were beating and bugles which they were blowing, and the pathetic martial air of these children as they played at the war game terrified us.’ As Margaret remembered, she was

an ardent believer in both the uselessness and utter impossibility of so barbaric  a solution of world problems. To Paul, it was more simple, for he immediately felt that as an Englishman it was his duty to fight for his country. He had a very clear and simple conception of his duty towards his country, which he passionately loved, and although he was the last human being in the world to tolerate the horror and cruelty of war, he had an immediate and firm conviction that he must fight for England.

As I remember him now, there comes back to me an Elizabethan atmosphere about his few remarks on the necessity of fighting for a country which meant poetry and beauty to him as an artist, and freedom of thought and action to him as an Englishman. And so I dumbly accepted his decision to enlist at once in the Artists Rifles …[12]

Nash spent the next two years on home service, before undergoing officer training; he was gazetted second-lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment at the end of 1916. ‘One thing that troubles me always is that I have done so awfully little so far,’ he wrote ruefully to Gordon Bottomley on New Year’s Day 1917, ‘never painted a picture yet only made a few queer drawings and oh, Gordon I did want to do something …’[13]

A month later he was on the Western Front. Luckily for Nash it was a quiet time in the Line, and at first he was happy. ‘It sounds absurd, but life has a greater meaning here and a new zest, and beauty is more poignant,’ he told Margaret. He continued to draw, making sketches of the blasted woods, a ruined church, a scarred hill, and ‘the trenches under a bloody sort of sunset, the crescent moon sailing above’.[14] Then on the night of 25 May 1917, a week before he was to lead his men over the top, Nash fell from a parapet and into a trench, breaking a rib. By 1 June he was back in London. According to Margaret’s account, when his company went into action shortly afterwards ‘they practically disappeared under an overwhelming barrage which had caught them in the advance.’[15] As Nash acknowledged, his escape ‘was a queer lucky accident’.[16]

           

Paul Nash, Chaos Decoratif (1917), watercolour: Manchester City Art Galleries

In June 1917 the watercolours he had painted at the Front were exhibited in London. Their success led to his recruitment into the Ministry of Information’s scheme of sending official artists to the Front. In November Nash thus returned to the Ypres Salient; there he made a series of drawings in the aftermath of the Allied armies’ Passchendaele offensive. Returning to London, it was only now, when he was almost thirty years old, that Nash completed his first painting in oil. As he told Gordon Bottomley in July 1918, these first attempts had been ‘a complete experiment you know – a piece of towering audacity I suppose as I had never painted before ...’[17]

Paul Nash, Wire (1918), watercolour: Imperial War Museum, London.

From 1918 until the end of his life Nash painted both in watercolour and oils – as well as producing prints, book illustrations, theatre designs, posters and textile designs. Despite the remarkable success of such early oils as We Are Making a New World (1918) and the monumental Menin Road (1919), for some years afterwards he would be considered as foremost a watercolourist.

’It is usual to feel that Mr. Nash is more at home with water-colours than oils,’ a critic from The Manchester Guardian observed in November 1928, ‘but this exhibition makes it quite clear that he is equally at ease in either medium.’[18]

Whilst he is more famous today for his work in oil, watercolours remained a significant part of Nash’s artistic output throughout his career. Indeed, in 1923 he joined Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner, John Nash, Lucien Pissarro, Randolph Schwabe, Edward Wadsworth and a number of other artists in the foundation of the Modern English Watercolour Society – all of whom felt that their work in this medium did not receive a fair chance of being seen at mixed exhibitions.[19] Nash also contributed works to various other exhibitions devoted exclusively to watercolours, and held solo exhibitions devoted solely to his watercolours. One such exhibition, at the Leicester Galleries in November 1932, was particularly successful. ‘Certainly Mr. Paul Nash is one of our most interesting artists,’ The Times observed, ‘particularly when … he works in water-colour.’[20] An exhibition of sixty new watercolours at the Redfern Gallery in London three years later elicited the response that ‘water-colour seems more apt for his [artistic] purposes than oil, in which he sometimes gives the impression of subjecting the fatter medium to the restrictions of fresco.’[21]

And in 1927 the critic P.G. Konody wrote that in the field of watercolours Nash ‘is now a master with a nice sense of the powers and limitations of his medium. He makes no attempt to make his water-colours look like oils, but preserves rigidly their character as drawings, and only uses his colour washes to tint a pencil outline.’ This ‘extremely reticent’ tinting, he noted, was characteristic of ‘the old English masters’, and of Cezanne – an artist who became an increasingly important influence on Nash in the years immediately after the Great War. For Konody, Nash was – ‘as far as England goes’ – a leader in the modern school of painting – in both watercolours and oil.[22] Admiring ‘a man who knows exactly what he wants to say and who can express his meaning in precise and elegant terms’, in 1929, the critic R.H. Wilenski called Nash ‘the John Sell Cotman of to-day’.[23]

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[1] Rothenstein (1957), 343-4.

[2] Nash to Gordon Bottomley, Abbott and Bertram (1955), 219.

[3] Nash (1949), 72.

[4] Nash (1949), 42, 31.

[5] Nash (1949), 72-3.

[6] Nash (1949), 74-6.

[7] Nash (1949), 88.

[8] Nash (1949), 136-7.

[9] Nash (1949), 117.

[10] Bertram (1955), 76.

[11] Rothenstein (1957), 342-3.

[12] M. Nash (1951), f. 7-8.

[13] PN to GB, 1 January 1917, in Abbott and Bertram (1955), 81.

[14] Nash (1949), 187.

[15] M. Nash (1951), f. 13.

[16] Nash to Gordon Bottomley, August 1917, Abbot & Bertram (1955), 85.

[17] Nash to Gordon Bottomley, 16 July 1918, Abbot & Bertram (1955), 98

[18] The Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1928.

[19] See The Times, 10 April 1923, p. 10.

[20] Bertram (1955), 174; The Times, 4 November 1932.

[21] The Times, 15 April 1935.

[22] The Observer, 11 November 1928.

[23] The Observer, 13 October 1929.