The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash

Roger Cardinal

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780231617
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

Paul Nash (1889-1946) has long been admired as one of the outstanding English landscape painters of this century. Nash has a deep affinity for such favourite sites in Southern England as the rolling downland near Swanage, the gaunt coastline at Dymchurch, the enigmatic stone circles at Avebury, and the twin hills in Oxfordshire known as the Wittenham Clumps which became his ultimate 'Place' and the focal symbol of his art.In this book Roger Cardinal surveys the full range of Nash's work, from the ravaged Flanders landscapes of World War One to the spectacular aerial battles of World War Two and the meditative late oils, his final materpieces.

1

Landscape is Paul Nash’s elective theme. This study of that theme seeks to show that, across three decades and more, Nash maintained a consistent set of preoccupations, and that his approach to the representation of the outer world is shaped both by a poetic attachment to the hidden qualities of natural things, and by aesthetic aims and allegiances largely derived from continental Modernism – principally Surrealism and Abstraction, which Nash once called ‘these two most powerful expressions of the modern spirit’.¹

I shall argue that the artist’s way of visualising landscape found expression in a painterly idiom of unusual surety and eloquence, based on a constellation of favourite motifs: the garden, the hill, the copse; the bird, the stone; the gate, the ladder, the window; the moon and sun, the clouds and the sea. These constitute a system of visible signs – a veritable language developed around the way Nash chose to perceive his environment. My thesis is that it is broadly possible to see Nash’s landscape production as a continuum, a prolonged meditation upon some fundamental changeless themes, such that each painting, drawing or photograph, and also each metaphor from the artist’s writings, takes its place as a component of a cross-referring network of imagery.

At the root of Nash’s way of looking at the outer world lies a neo-Romantic propensity to discern in natural settings the symbolic equivalent of inner states. Again and again Nash finds himself drawn to certain places and certain configurations of natural phenomena which act as receptacles for subjective impulse. Empty of human figures though almost all his painted landscapes are, they are in a sense saturated with human presence and meaning. In their totality, the images he produces may on a superficial level be described as a selective topography of Southern England. On a deeper level, they represent the transcript of a man’s private sensibility, even a special sort of autobiography wherein introspective preoccupations achieve expression within a code of symbolic forms.

A dominant concern of this survey of Paul Nash’s landscapes is thus the artistic sensibility itself, that shaping consciousness which selects and elaborates its impressions of the non-human environment, to create a register of states sometimes only too human, sometimes almost otherworldly in their tonality. Nash’s works articulate a persistent affinity for Nature and a yearning for the revelation of its latent meanings; a commitment to certain gestures all but resembling courtship or possession (gazing, stalking, flying, seizing upon distant detail); and finally a confrontation with such painful topics as desolation and death.

The Chronology at the end of this book offers certain factual details concerning Nash’s creative life as a supplement to my discussion of his work. Nash’s biography is marked by the trauma of his mother’s mental illness and early death, by a series of other bereavements, and by personal confrontations with death which begin with his exposure to shellfire in 1917 and end with the sombre succession of asthmatic and bronchial crises against which he fought so tenaciously through the last fifteen years of his life. Inevitably the pictures made by a sensitive artist will reflect something of such suffering: equally, it is the case that art offers a space wherein painful psychic experience can be sublimated, if not erased. My feeling is that landscape became for Nash the domain of a separate fulfilment – not merely an escapist sanctuary, but a special testing ground with its own constraints and privileges. To speak of Nash’s landscape vision is to honour the frame of reference within which he chose to invest the greater part of his energy; and although some of my discussion acknowledges an existential and psychological context, I would emphasise that my ultimate concern is not to talk about Nash’s involuntary deficiencies, but to respond to those superior communications which are the assured outline of what he most wanted to say and be – his paintings and photographs.

It would be an over-simplification to present this landscape artist purely in terms of a compulsion to address, again and again, the appearances of certain particularly revelatory sites, for the tasks of enhanced transliteration which Nash set himself must equally be considered in the light of a parallel and occasionally problematic commitment to the fact of painting itself, to art, to that practice of devising visual patterns within a frame – through the disposition of shapes, the inscribing of telling conjunctures of line, colour and texture, the cross-linking of forms, and so forth. In short, an account of an artist’s vision of landscape must also address aesthetic and formal considerations. Thus, if it is the case that Nash’s visual motifs do indeed carry special meanings, tending to establish a connotative field whence emerge figurative implications, it must be remembered that the fullest appreciation of those implications should be supported not only by biographical reference but by an alertness to the stylistic devices whereby the artist keeps his motifs in focus, the ways in which he highlights their relevance to what he wants to suggest.

Unfortunately, a close chronological account of Nash’s stylistic evolution lies beyond the confines of this short essay. There is also no space to develop a discussion of his antecedents in the English landscape tradition (Crome, Cotman, Palmer) or of his early devotion to Rossetti; of the tonal and compositional lessons he seems to have drawn from Cézanne; of the enigma-making techniques he picked up from continental Surrealism; and of the various non-figurative procedures with which he experimented under the impact of work by Picasso and Matisse, or English abstractionists like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth; not to mention those details within his work which reveal a complicity with contemporaries like C. W. R. Nevinson, Ben Nicholson, Edward Wadsworth, Graham Sutherland and Edward Burra, or again with the younger surrealists of 1936 like Julian Trevelyan and Eileen Agar. The fact that Nash’s younger brother John also became a successful landscape painter points to a further dimension of comparative research. It is evident that the full story of Nash’s artistic affinities and borrowings remains to be written. Acknowledging an omission in not situating Nash’s achievement within the wider context of the century’s avant-garde, I hope to compensate by concentrating all the more sharply on the fundamentals of his production – the oil paintings, water-colours and photographs which he made and whose cumulative ‘panorama’ necessarily mirrors the characteristic way Nash looked at things, a vision at times idiosyncratic yet strangely clear-sighted and often uncannily persuasive.

2

Nash’s creative life was characterised by periods of relative stability punctuated by intervals of frenetic mobility. During the twenty-two years of their marriage, Paul and Margaret Nash set up residence in cottages in Dymchurch and Iden, town-houses in Rye and Swanage, a farmhouse outside Swan-age, a London house in Hampstead and finally a flat in Oxford. The couple frequently returned to the small London flat which Margaret Nash kept up after their marriage. Only a few of these homes were big enough to encompass a studio; usually, though, there was a garden with an attractive view.

In between sessions of sustained work in these fixed retreats, Nash would set forth on frequent excursions. It is true that his travels abroad are relatively few: he was twice sent to the battlefields of Flanders during the First World War, crossed the Atlantic once in 1931, and made two important trips to France in 1930 and 1933–4, venturing during the latter as far as Spain and Morocco. Largely because of ill-health, he never set foot outside Britain during the last twelve years of his life, even though his reputation abroad was growing. Equally it is the case that his range within Britain was not markedly far-flung, for although he had some acquaintance with Wales and parts of Northern England, he never got as far as Cornwall or Scotland, and certainly never considered going to Ireland. Nevertheless, Nash’s explorations of the terrain of Southern England from an early age are considerable and reveal a significant pattern of emotional attachments. Never a mere sightseer, he regularly revisited chosen places in an attempt to gain deeper insight into their special magic, as well as, more simply, to renew his emotional stock in nourishing surroundings.

Nash knew a good many people (few of them artists), and the range of landscape settings in his work reflects in large part the generosity of many obliging friends – the Nicholsons at Brampton in Cumberland, the Buchanans from whom he rented Oxenbridge Cottage at Iden, his brother John at Meadle, Hilda Felce who lent the Nashes her Tudor farmhouse outside Swanage, the Neilsons of Madams in Gloucestershire and Hilda Harrisson of Sandlands at Boar’s Hill near Oxford; these last two-named being the crucial settings for some masterly paintings completed in the last few years of Nash’s life. Where no convenient invitation was to hand, Nash would resort to such favourite hostelries as the Red Lion Inn near the Whiteleaf Cross in the Chilterns, the Three Swans at Hungerford in Berkshire, or the Rising Sun at Cleeve Hill in the Cots wolds, with its marvellous prospect of the Severn Valley. A certain poetry in the names of many of these retreats may well have enhanced his sense of attachment.

Nash was never physically robust – indeed his chronic lung condition made of him a semi-invalid during his final years – but his zest for visits and outings seems never to have waned. The 1930s were the heyday of motoring for pleasure and though Nash did not drive himself, nor ever owned a car, he was able to benefit from the support of motoring friends like Clare Neilson and Archibald Russell. In 1935, he devoted most of the year to compiling the Dorset Shell Guide. This popularising work reflects two contrary yet linked values which are integral to Nash’s aesthetics: the notion of the modern, embodied in the motor-car, emblem of stylish comfort and speed, and the archaic, embodied in those Dorset sites, semi-humanised or entirely wild, to the secrets of which Nash seemed to have privileged access. Nash’s sensibility evidently thrived on the alternating rhythms of hectic displacement and meditative ‘rooting-in’. An afternoon’s racing around between chosen sites would be interspersed with sessions of browsing and reflection, when Nash would bring out sketchbook or drawing paper to record a view, the basis of an eventual watercolour and perhaps an oil.

In fact, the hustle and bustle which interrupted the calm of Nash’s home life could hardly be attributed strictly to the pressures of a professional career, for, as a quite successful artist, Nash could never rationally have claimed that repeated house-moves and abrupt bouts of travelling were indispensable to the production of saleable pictures. Nothing in the outside world really forced Nash to move about as much as he did; his brother John, also an established landscape painter, was far from being so peripatetic. To see Nash’s life as a succession of unsettlements and resettlements is to gain insight into the nature of a temperament in which unusual qualities of patience and resilience are contrasted with impulses of petulance, erratic switches of direction, an occasional quarrelsomeness. What concerns us here, however, is the fact of his resolute loyalty to certain landscapes. Moreover, while he was fascinated by the sea, and at times enjoyed storms and rain, it seems axiomatic that it was to serene, well-lit parkland scenes that Nash felt most drawn. The frenzy of journeying is, as it were, simply the excited prelude to more essential activities of contemplation and reflective transcription, activities which slow down body movement and conduce to states of engrossment, even entrancement. (Photographs of Nash at work in the open air tend to show him crouched over his drawing board, often in hat and overcoat; in later life, when his asthmatic condition made walking difficult, he would frequently sketch from inside a parked car.)

What interests me in this is the importance for Nash of feeling properly situated, in touch with a specific place during those long sessions of meditative stillness: the sensation of travel diminishes alongside that of having arrived, of being at a particular site and being able to engage with it in an unrushed, empathetic way. Above all, it is not just to any old tourist attraction that Nash is oriented, but to sites which correspond to certain values already perceptible within himself, and which help to determine and foster those values. A listing of the more prominent places he regularly visited may be an evocative indication of his enthusiasms. Their common denominator – Nash’s readiness to give them priority in his creative life – should give a clue to the expectations of a man possessed of a special vision of the world.

3

A review of Nash’s favourite places must begin with mention of the gardens where he loved to linger and ponder. From earliest childhood he had ascribed magical qualities to the disposition of trees and bushes about shady lawns. One of his earliest memories is of being taken to Kensington Gardens and of stumbling upon what he calls ‘my first authentic place’, in a corner of the gardens which was ‘strangely beautiful and excitingly unsafe’.

This place of mine was not remarkable for any unusual features which stood out. Yet there was a peculiar spacing in the disposal of the trees, or it was their height in relation to these intervals, which suggested some inner design of very subtle purpose, altogether defeating the conventional layout of the gardens.²

Similarly thrilling emotions were associated with the house at Iver Heath to which the family moved when he was twelve. The garden comprised a lawn planted with flowers and shrubs and a spinney of young trees, and was bounded by a line of tall and ancient elms. Here Nash found another instance of genius loci, the spirit of a place. The phrase, originally used by Nash as the title of his autobiography, later retitled Outline, evoked for him not some eerie notion of psychic haunting, but rather a quality of spatial relations: ‘Like the territory in Kensington Gardens which I found as a child, its magic lay within itself, implicated in its own design and its relationship to its surroundings’.³ Something of its queer beauty can be inferred from one of Nash’s first watercolours of the place, Bird Garden (1911; illus. 4), where the artist has carefully pinpointed a disposition of plants and low trees about a lawn half lit, half in shadow, with a backdrop of loftier trees and areas of sky marked by two dark birds soaring and another which flashes white as it dives past. To this bird I shall return, as a deliberate index of the poetic: for the moment let me simply suggest that the garden thus imaged communicates an air of the paranormal and yet essentially visible beauty of the site. Much depends, as we shall see, on the mode of perception underlying such sightings and construings.

In later life, Nash’s enthusiasm for gardens is recorded in various photographs he took which pick out such features as the clipped topiary work of the Box Garden at Beckley Park in Oxfordshire, a line of leafless elms at Ascot Park, Stadhampton, or the poignantly unkempt flowerbeds at Kelmscott Manor, where Rossetti had once lived. Elsewhere he seems struck by the eeriness of white statuary gleaming within clumps of deep shadow, finding several instances of such effects in gardens like that of Springfield near Rye in Sussex, or of the Stone House at Kingston Bagpuize in Berkshire. Here nay be detected a more conventional eye for picturesque detail, the paradoxical semblance of vigour in the limbs of a white figure frozen amid abundant natural growth. Shadowiness and a sense of enclosure often make Nash’s gardens seem like external correlatives of an inner need for secrecy and security; each is a protective environment withheld from public gaze. We are not far from inferring that the English garden, typically a little overgrown and enclosing, has qualities of the disquieting yet also of a kind of maternal cosiness. Much of Nash’s garden imagery does indeed seem self-engrossed and withdrawn; and although Anthony Bertram suggests that, late in life, the artist began to stand back within a hedged or walled garden, as at Boar’s Hill or Madams, to confront the challenge of what lay distantly beyond, it is true that Nash’s own gardens in Hampstead and Oxford, which he tended in his last years, were walled and closed-in, spaces of sanctuary rather than of exposure.

As a lover of the English countryside, Nash could hardly have been dispassionate about trees and woodland. Among his favourite woods were a place he and his brother called Hawk’s Wood, near Iver Heath, where he made some of his earliest pictures, startling himself into an appreciation of his vocation as something of a specialist in tree drawings; the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean, with its traces of abandoned mineshafts, are other favourite sites. Conversely though, Nash could also appreciate entirely treeless, or at least minimally wooded spaces, such as the flat expanses of the Romney Marsh and the gaunt shoreline at Dymchurch, a subject defined and interrogated in dozens of pictures during the 1920s. Here may be discerned a somewhat masochistic attraction to harsh, unsmiling forms – the sea, the black breakwaters, the cold and curving stone wall – whose ‘genius’ might be said to lie in an extreme refusal of prettiness, something undisguisedly hard and uncompromising, a setting against which to test one’s resources rather than one within which to nurture them. It should also be said that Nash’s transition from the luxuriant to the ascetic in the Dymchurch period equally reflects an aesthetic desire to pare down his painterly style to a refined minimalism. Thus it is possible to see in an image such as Dymchurch Wall (illus. 6) both a celebration of the harsh beauty of Dymchurch; a confrontation with one extreme of the artist’s psychological range, the moods of alienation and futility perhaps; and finally a search for a certain pictorial formalism based on the interaction of areas of pure colour, separated by icily acute lines.

Nash was not to resist the appeal of certain famous landscapes whose beauty could hardly be counted a personal discovery: he relished trips to the Wye and Se...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash
• References
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• List of Illustrations