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
[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.
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