- Landscape, Stone Cliff - Paul Nash (London 1889

Landscape, Stone Cliff evokes the spirit of an idyllic afternoon at the height of summer. Painted in 1921, the watercolour seems to reflect Paul Nash’s positive mental state at the time, having recovered from the emotionally harrowing experience of documenting the First World War. The setting sun, tinged with pink, emits warmth and light over the undulating countryside, and the trees strain to catch the last of its rays. Signs of a human presence on the landscape can be detected in the buildings and windmill silhouetted on the horizon and in the divisions across the fields; the scene, however, is a celebration of nature’s unbridled splendour.

Although avowedly a modernist, Nash’s identification with the essence of places and his sympathy in conveying the mood of the landscape reflects the paintings of his artistic forebears such as the English Romanticist Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). He was also greatly inspired by the watercolours of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), which can be detected in the flat planes of colour and rhythmical linearity that defines the present work. In areas of Landscape, Stone Cliff, the pencil marks appear to have been drawn over the wash, a method that Cézanne also frequently employed.

Cézanne’s influence is even more apparent in a watercolour painted by Nash four years later, The Colne, in the Tate Gallery. Here, the pencil marks are less prominent and the sweeps of colour have broadened, while the curved lines are more pronounced. The Colne hints at Nash’s move towards abstraction, which dominated his later work, whereas Landscape, Stone Cliff is primarily figurative.

Nash briefly attended the Slade School, London, at the age of twenty-one, although he was primarily self-taught. Two years later he had his first one-man show, at the Carfax Gallery in London, exhibiting works inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and late nineteenth-century illustrators. During World War I, he served as an officer on the Western Front, but was soon invalided out after sustaining injuries. He returned as an Official War Artist between 1917 and 1918. After the war, he moved to Kent, where he painted landscapes such as the present one. In the late 1920s, when the artistic climate in England and Europe was becoming more innovative and daring, Nash also became more experimental, painting in a style influenced by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). He extended his subject matter to include urban scenes and began moving towards surrealism, which he described as ‘the extension of liberty of the subject’.¹ During World War II, he was again an Official War Artist, working mainly for the Air Ministry, and his paintings of the period incorporate rich symbolism and mythological references. He also began to re-examine his interests in seasonal changes and the rising and setting of the sun, first explored in early compositions such as the present one. Having twice been at the front, recording the horrors of war, Nash’s paintings often exhibit a preoccupation with mortality and have a sinister or mournful undercurrent. Viewed against the majority of his oeuvre, therefore, Landscape, Stone Cliff appears even more delightfully exuberant.

¹ Frances Spalding, British Art Since 1900, London (1986), p.107.