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Paul Nash LG NEAC SWE (1889-1946)
Paul Nash was born in Kensington, London on 11 May 1889, and was educated at Colet Court and St Paul's School (1899-1906). He then studied art at the LCC Technical School, Bolt Court (1908-12) and the Slade School (1910-12). At first uncertain as to whether to become a poet or a painter, he was strongly influenced by Rossetti but, undistinguished in his figure work, he was encouraged by Claughton Pellew and Sir William Richmond to concentrate upon landscape. Literary interests continued in his important correspondence with a protégé of Charles Ricketts, poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley, and in his study of Samuel Palmer. Following a joint exhibition with his brother, John Nash (1913), he was held in particular esteem by the critic Roger Fry.
As a result, he joined the Omega Workshops and worked with Fry on the restoration of the Mantegna frescoes at Hampton Court. At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted with the Artists' Rifles and in 1916 took a commission with the Hampshire Regiment. Invalided a year later, he exhibited his watercolours of the war at the Goupil Gallery, London, before returning to France as an Official War Artist (1917-19).
A new, tougher phase, including his first use of oils, led to his election to the New English Art Club (1919). He made further technical experiments, as a printmaker, and stretched his talents with theatre design, art criticism and teaching, in Oxford (1920) and at the Royal College Of Art (1922-25; 1938-40). But at the centre of this breadth of interests lay a series of metaphysical landscapes. Travels to Italy (1925) and France (1930) helped Nash to view his work within a European context and, from de Chirico's London exhibition (1928), he was influenced by Surrealism. Ever active and dynamic, in 1932 alone he exhibited watercolours at the Mayor Gallery and published both a volume of essays, Room and Book, and an illustrated edition of Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus & Urne Buriall; he was also elected President and Chairman of the Society of Industrial Artists and represented Britain for a second time at the Venice Biennale (previously in 1926; again in 1938).
He formed Unit One with Henry Moore and other like-minded artists (1933), exhibited at the Artists' International Association and was a committee member of the first of several International Surrealist Exhibitions. During the Second World War, he was again appointed an Official War Artist, but also worked on an important series of oils and watercolours inspired by Frazer's The Golden Bough. A show of watercolours (New York 1945) and a retrospective (Cheltenham 1945) preceded his death on holiday at Boscombe, Hampshire on 11 July 1946. A memorial exhibition was held at the Tate Gallery in 1948 and an autobiography, Outline, was published a year later.
Further reading: Andrew Causey (editor), Poet and Painter: letters between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash 1910-1946, Bristol: Redcliffe, 1990 Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 Andrew Causey and Margot Eates, Paul Nash, London: Tate Gallery, 1975
