Paul Nash

(British, 1889–1946)

Paul Nash was a British artist whose unique landscape paintings melded Surrealism, British Romanticism, and a Cézanne-like paint application. A World War I veteran, Nash often depicted the devastated battlefields of Belgium and France, as seen in his work The Menin Road (1919). “Imagine a wide landscape flat and scantily wooded and what trees remain blasted and torn, naked and scarred and riddled,” he once described. Born on May 11, 1889 in London, United Kingdom, he studied at the Slade School of Art alongside Ben Nicholson, Dora Carrington, and Stanley Spencer. In 1914, the 25 year old Nash enlisted in the British Army and was sent to the Western Front early in 1917. A few months into to his tour he was sent back to London to recover from a broken rib, during his absence the majority of his unit was killed. He returned to the Western Front as a war artist, disturbed by the destruction he saw, the artist made it his duty to convey the horror of war to the British public. After the war, Nash began using his watercolors and ink drawings from the trenches as references for oil paintings. Through the following decades, he established himself as an illustrator and painter. The artist died on July 11, 1946 in Boscombe, United Kingdom and was survived by his brother the painter John Nash. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.