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John Nash, The Cornfield, 1918 (Tate)
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Few
paintings express a soldier’s joy in returning safely home as beautifully as The
Cornfield, John Nash’s gilded vision of corn stooks dancing a jig (or so it
seems) on a Buckinghamshire hillside. In the summer of 1918 the war was still
raging, but he had been plucked from his foxhole in the Flanders mud to work as
a war artist alongside his brother Paul. Their days were spent in a former
herb-drying shed, working for the Ministry of War on paintings that would serve
as a memorial to the conflict. While Paul recreated the phantasmagoric
landscapes he had witnessed as an observer in the autumn of 1917, John worked
from his firsthand experience of battle to produce first Over The Top, a
painting that simply and hauntingly portrays the human cost of war, then Oppy
Wood, in which the ghastly trench landscape is shown beneath a sky of blue.
The battle was dreadful, the painting seems to say, but it is over.
Think of
John Nash and it is probably one of these three oil paintings that will spring to
mind. The long and productive career that followed Nash’s brief sojourn as a
war artist has largely been forgotten. Indeed, Andrew Lambirth’s elegant 2019 monograph
is the first major book on the artist ever published, and The Landscape of
Love and Solace, accompanying the new book of the same title by Andy Friend, is the first large-scale exhibition since Nash’s 1967
retrospective at the Royal Academy. Without a strident champion many artists fade
from public view after death, and only the best have a chance of being
resurrected years later. In Nash’s case such a revival has been on the cards
for a while, but the timing of this joyful, sensitive exhibition could not be
better. After a year of gallery deprivation visitors to Towner are in for a
treat.
Although he
lacked formal art school training Nash was from an early age both a gifted
draughtsman and acute observer of nature. His love of plants evolved into a
passion for gardening, and with a large swathe of the British public sharing
this enthusiasm, magazine and book publishers commissioned him to make exquisite
botanical illustrations in a variety of media. His line drawings are sensational
but Nash was also, lest we forget, one of the pioneers of modern wood engraving.
His wicked, wonderful 1927 book Poisonous Plants is a treasure that reveals
both his skill as an engraver and the complex chiaroscuro of his personality. Nash
experienced more than his share of heartbreak and suffered lifelong from
periods of depression. But he retained a delicious sense of humour and a
passion for the countryside, the latter inspiring the oil paintings and
watercolours of hills and farms, woods and ponds that are his true legacy. There
is no overt symbolism or overpowering design in paintings like The Lake,
Little Horkesley Hall. The composition is subtle, the tones carefully
balanced and the brushwork delicate. These paintings need to be savoured. Like
the hidden places Nash sought out, they reveal their secrets slowly.
John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace is at Towner, Eastbourne. I wrote this preview for the May 2021 issue of World of Interiors.
