Paul Nash masterpiece to be auctioned at Christie's

Paul Nash, A Farm, Wytschaete (1917)

This work is to be auctioned at Christie's in London on 26 June 2017, estimate £250,000 to £300,000. I have written the following text for the catalogue.

As Tate Britain’s recent retrospective has confirmed, Paul Nash was one of our most significant twentieth century artists: experimenter, seer, surrealist, modernist. But it was his experiences in the Great War that made him. Prior to August 1914 Nash had been an imaginative English watercolourist with a penchant for poetry and trees: inspired by William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the recent dramas of Post-Impressionism, Futurism and Vorticism had largely passed him by.

            A few months in the Ypres Salient in the spring and winter of 1917 changed all that: as the Tate Director John Rothenstein accurately observed in his seminal 1950s study, Modern English Painters, ‘What [Nash] experienced in that place of desolation made him an artist as decisively as the scenes of his boyhood by the River Stour made Constable an artist … 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.’[1]

            Having volunteered with the Artists’ Rifles in September 1914, Nash was posted to the Western Front as a junior infantry officer with the Hampshire Regiment in the early months of 1917. ‘I have simply been as excited as a schoolboy,’ he wrote to his wife, Margaret, though he would soon be reflecting on ‘the nightmare of the trenches’.[2] Then, one night in May, he fell into a concealed trench, broke a rib, and was invalided home. It was a lucky accident that quite probably saved his life. A few weeks later his battalion went ‘over the top’, and as Margaret recalled in her memoir, ‘Paul’s own Company practically disappeared under an over-whelming barrage’. [3]

            Safely back in London, Nash held a well-received exhibition of watercolours he had made in France and Belgium. Its success led to his selection by the government as an official war artist; he returned to Ypres in November 1917. There he got as close to the action as he could: Margaret even records that some of his drawings ‘actually had mud spattered upon them from nearby exploding shells, which he at times worked in to help with the colour of the drawing’.[4] Witnessing the last stages of the Battle of Paschaendale, what Nash saw appalled him. ‘I am no longer an artist interested & curious,’ he wrote in a now famous letter to his wife: ‘I am a messenger who will bring back word from men fighting to those who want the war to last for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’[5]

            Fifty-six of these ‘messages’ were exhibited as ‘Void of War’ at the Leicester Galleries in May 1918. They included The Farm, Wytschaete, as well as numerous other views of destruction on the Western Front now in significant national collections, among them Broken Trees, Wytschaete (Victoria and Albert Museum), Landscape, Year of Our Lord 1917 (National Gallery of Canada) and the iconic oil painting We Are Making a New World (Imperial War Museum). ‘What you see are chiefly the actual sketches done on the spot, on brown paper for the sake of rapidity,’ the author Arnold Bennett wrote in an introductory note to the accompanying catalogue. ‘The original impression may have been intensified afterwards by a method in which body-colour, chalk, pastel, and ink are all employed; but the original impression remains, and it is authentic.’[6]

            These watercolours and drawings were, as Bennett affirmed, ‘first-hand documents,’ and they would prove to be among the most powerful works produced by any artist, anywhere, over the course of the whole war. In the opinion of the American poet Ezra Pound, writing in New Age in July 1918, ‘Void of War’ was ‘the best show of war art … that we have had.’[7] They made Nash’s name.

            ‘I know of no works of art made by any artist working there who saw the splendours and miseries of the greatest of all theatres of war so grandly,’ John Rothenstein wrote four decades later. ‘Out of infinite horror [Nash] distilled a new poetry. The best of them will take their place among the finest imaginative works of our time …’[8] Without a shadow of doubt The Farm, Wytschaete, is among the very best of them. Nash had been warned that he could not record dead British soldiers: instead, the landscape here becomes a metaphor for the horrors that he witnessed: the red gaping wound in the earth and the dismembered trees articulate what it was, perhaps, impossible to actually paint.

            The wealthy artist Charles Maresco Pearce (1874-1964) purchased The Farm, Wytschaete directly from the exhibition. A member of the New English Art Club and (from 1929) the London Group, Pearce was a great collector, owning works by (among others) Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin and Walter Sickert. Gauguin’s Harvest: Le Pouldu (1890), now in the Tate Gallery, was once part of his collection.

David Boyd Haycock

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[1] John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, Sickert to Moore (London: Eyre & Spotiswood, 1957), p. 343.

[2] Paul Nash to Margaret Nash 21 March 1917 and 26 April 1917, in Paul Nash Outline: An Autobiography, a New Edition edited by David Boyd Haycock (London: Lund Humphries, 2017), pp. 168 and 174

[3] Ibid. p. 194.

[4] Ibid. p. 195.

[5] Paul Nash to Margaret Nash 13 November 1917, ibid. p. 187.

[6] ‘Introductory note’ by Arnold Bennett to ‘Void of War’: An Exhibition of Pictures by Lieut. Paul Nash (London: Leicester Galleries, 1918).

[7] Ezra Pound (writing under the pseudonym B.H. Dias), New Age, 18 July 1918.

[8] John Rothenstein, op cit., p. 347.

British Watercolours at the British Museum

The Official War Artists scheme that was launched by the British government in 1916 would go on to commission work from some of the most significant artists of the century: William Orpen, Augustus John, Percy Wyndham Lewis and John Singer Sargent from the older generation, and from among ‘les jeunes’ (as Roger Fry dubbed them), William Roberts, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson, David Bomberg and Paul Nash, to name just a few. An early idea was that a great ‘War Museum’ would be purpose built to house this work: Charles Holden’s surviving sketch suggests an immense temple that would have been filled with paintings and sculptures, with Sargent’s Gassed and Nash’s Menin Road as two of its centrepieces. Hardly surprisingly the government did not have the money to invest in such a grand project after almost bankrupting itself in the defeat of Germany – it was impressive enough that it was willing to spare thousands of pounds and release young officers like Nash from active service to paint pictures.

But wouldn’t it have been a wonderful centenary project to have built that temple of war art, instead of leaving those paintings to languish in upstairs rooms at the back of the Imperial War Museum? Perhaps we will be able to afford it in time for the centenary of the Second World War instead – when the government again invested precious time and money in the production of art.

Another grand project close to my heart is a gallery that would celebrate another great British achievement – the humble watercolour, rightly or wrongly so widely and often acknowledged as a particularly British medium. Right now there is a step in that direction at the British Museum: ‘Places of the Mind: British Watercolour Landscapes, 1850-1950,’ curated by Kim Sloan. When I visited, the galleries – also located slightly off the beaten track at the back and upstairs in the BM – were pretty crowded, and Dr Sloan told me that the show was enjoying a high footfall. This deserved success clearly illustrates the public appetite for this medium and subject matter.

Paul Nash, The Wanderer, or Path through Trees (1911) British Museum

 With 125 works in watercolour, pastel and pen and ink celebrating these media in the hundred years following Turner’s death, Paul Nash’s hauntingly enigmatic 1911 painting The Wanderer, or, Path through Trees, is the opening work. It sets the tone for the whole show, and graces both the poster and the accompanying catalogue. Nash was a master at this type of work – you don’t have to look too closely at his pictures to discover how what is ostensibly a watercolour can often actually also include chalk or pen-and-ink highlights. The many other artists include James Whistler, Graham Sutherland, Ambrose McEvoy, Hercules Brabazon, Philip Wilson Steer, Henry Moore, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson and John Craxton (from among my more modern favourites) as well a whole gamut of earlier Victorian practitioners: John William North, Samuel Palmer, Edward Lear, George Clausen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen Allingham – all of them drawn from the Museum’s extensive Prints and Drawing Room collections. Also squeezed in are a couple of works by Francis Towne and John Sell Cotman which, whilst breaking the strict chronology of the exhibition, draw it further back into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are worthy historical inclusions: Cotman’s Greta Bridge, for example, was a favourite of Eric Ravilious’s, who is also represented here with the very early watercolour, Wannock Dew Pond, so unlike the works of the 1930s that would make him famous.

John Sell Cotman, Greta Bridge (c.1806-7), British Museum

It’s a great show, and one that does hopefully mark another little step on the road to a permanent gallery, somewhere in England, devoted entirely to the medium and its long and distinguished history.