Paul Nash (artist) - War Artist

War Artist

At the outbreak of World War I, Nash reluctantly enlisted in the Artists' Rifles and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. A few days before the Ypres offensive he fell into a trench. He broke a rib and was invalided home. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from his front-line sketches to produce a series of drawings of the war. This work, which shows the influence of the literary magazine BLAST and the Vorticist movement of which it was a manifesto, was well received when exhibited later that year at the Goupil Gallery.

As a result of this exhibition, Nevinson advised Nash to approach Charles Masterman, head of the government's War Propaganda Bureau (WPB). Nash was recruited as an official war artist, and in November 1917 he returned to the Western Front where his drawings resulted in his first oil paintings. Nash's work during the war included The Menin Road, We Are Making a New World, The Ypres Salient at Night, The Mule Track, A Howitzer Firing, Ruined Country and Spring in the Trenches. They are some of the most powerful and enduring images of the Great War painted by an English artist.

Nash used his opportunity as a war artist to bring home the full horrors of the conflict. As he wrote to his wife from the front on 16 November 1917:

"I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls."

In the early 1920s, Nash, along with several other artists became prominent in the Society of Wood Engravers and in 1920 was involved in its first exhibition. He became close friends with Eric Fitch Daglish whom he educated in the art of wood engraving and Daglish as a result went on to become a successful engraver.

Nash was also a pioneer of modernism in Britain, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933 he co-founded the influential modern art movement Unit One with fellow artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Edward Wadsworth and the critic Herbert Read. It was a short-lived but important move towards the revitalisation of British art in the inter-war period.

During World War II Nash was again employed as an official war artist, this time by the Ministry of Information and the Air Ministry, and paintings he produced during this period include the Battle of Britain and Totes Meer (Dead Sea).

Nash found much inspiration in British landscape, particularly landscapes with a sense of ancient history, such as burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts such as Wittenham Clumps and the standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire. When in 1932 he was invited to illustrate a book of his own choice Nash unhesitating choose Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus providing the publisher with a set of no less than 32 illustrations to accompany Browne's Discourses. In his final years, he also returned to the influence of Blake that had so affected his early art, for example in the series of gigantic sunflowers including Sunflower and Sun (1942) and Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) based on Blake's poem Ah! Sunflower.