The Nash Brothers: Visions of England

The English have a strong tradition of landscape painting. From Gainsborough, through Turner and Constable, to David Hockney. The English countryside is a subject that has captivated artists and audiences for generations. In a century as calamitous as the twentieth the bucolic landscapes of the past needed rethinking, could a simple field with cows, or a sunset across the hills reflect and redeem an epoch of such dramatic change and flux. In the first half of the century, when the established Victorian order was being shattered, two brothers emerged who would redefine how we saw the English landscape in the modern age.

  Paul Nash and his younger brother John were children of the late nineteenth century, placing them in that fateful generation whose youth was shaped by the global conflict and upheaval that would define the modern age. Their childhood was spent in the country at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire, where both boys sketched the trees in their garden to distract themselves from their mother’s mental instability. She would die in an asylum in 1910, the same year Paul entered the Slade School of Art in London. The students of the Slade before the war would go on to become some of the most significant artists of the century such as Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, C.R.W. Nevinsion, and Mark Gertler, to name but a few. Whilst John Nash had no formal art training, these connections of his brother’s helped introduce him to the London art scene. 

  When war came in 1914 both brothers enlisted, fought in the trenches, and saw the destruction that fully mechanised war wrought on the landscape. They saw a new terrain created, one marked by industrialised death. It would leave its mark on both men. John’s Oppy Wood (1917) has all the quiet solidity of a Constable but none of the greenery – the only green here is the khaki uniforms of the soldiers. It is not an image of war but rather a description of a landscape at war – the forgotten victim. The only immediate symbols of conflict are the shell bursts in the distance, but the signs of their power are very much present, after all, this is a terrain that they built. It is a solid image of a landscape very much in flux.

  Meanwhile, Paul produced a landscape less realist but more visceral in its emotion. In this work nature has been dismembered and the wounds are raw. He wrote in his youth of drawing trees as if they were people, each with its own life, its own body and limbs. If the trees here are people they are the scared, the mutilated, and the war dead. There are no people in this work because the trees speak for them. He titled it We Are Making A New World (1918), an ironic social commentary as much as a literal description of the enormous earth moving potential of mechanical warfare.

  This article is about these artists’ visions of England, but so far we have only seen works of continental Europe. But these paintings are important to keep in mind when looking at the rural English scenes of their post war years, both brother’s took what they saw in France with them, but in very different ways. After the war, John would find himself in the spiritual homeland of British landscape painting, Constable’s beloved Dedham Vale in Suffolk. From there he would travel around the country painting quiet, unpopulated scenes of rural England and Wales, often agricultural views of fields and hedgerows. In works such as The Cornfield (1918) he focuses on the varied texture and undulating lines of the landscape, hard outlines and flat colour sometimes bring him close to abstraction whilst remaining realistic enough that we can believe it is a view glimpsed through a gate on a country ramble. For John, the answer to the trauma of war, both on his nerves and the landscape, was to return to a honest and unadulterated relationship with his native land. An arcadian vision of England attempting to revive a pre-war innocence – years later the poet Philip Larkin would write of the same such landscapes:

 Paul, meanwhile, was engaged in a more metaphysical relationship with the landscape. For him, a landscape painting could be just as emotionally and spiritually charged as any portrait or narrative painting. Towards the end of his life, and under the influence of European surrealism, he would paint a series of views showing the Wittenham clumps. With their ethereal light and unnatural palette, they would be better described as dreamscapes. Similarly, his images of the sea and coast around Dymchurch in Kent possess an unearthly stillness and freezing solitude that speaks far more of the artist’s mind than of the reality of the landscape. Paul found the English countryside to be the perfect canvas on which he could paint his emotions – it was a means of expression rather than the pure, tactile relationship found in the works of his brother. 

  For me, the greatest synthesis of these two visions of England is found in Paul’s 1938 work ‘Landscape from a Dream’. The component parts are all motifs of the English countryside, all motifs found in John’s paintings – the coast, the hills, blue skies, and agricultural fields – yet the composition is one entirely of the mind. The wooden frame, or mirror, or maybe painting within the painting, introduces multiple horizons with no indication as to which one, if any, is real. Along with the bird of prey appearing three times in different forms, these collected motifs collapse our understanding of space within the landscape, undermining our usual parameters for the comprehension of a landscape painting and forcing us to view each element in isolation. This becomes a hybrid of John’s elegies for the English countryside with Paul’s acute emotional and psychological relationships with the world. 

  Later in life John turned increasingly to illustration and engraving but always with the English landscape as his subject. Eventually the agricultural workers began to appear in his work, such as the charming Harvesting (1947), but for me his most compelling paintings are those studies in texture of the timeless countryside, A Suffolk Landscape (1936-7) being a particularly good example of how an almost monochromatic work can capture such a complete and atmospheric sense of place – you can smell the cool, fresh breeze coming off the canvas.

  Paul, always the more emotionally charged of the two brothers would die young of asthma in 1946. He would leave a great legacy of war painting from both world wars as well as his output of intensely personal landscape work. His metaphysical vision of England would be a significant inspiration for the group of British artists that followed; Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and John Piper would all take their queue from the earthy yet unnatural, organic yet introspective work of Paul Nash.

  The Nash brothers produced some of the most compelling images of England in the twentieth century. At a time so consumed with global crisis and suffering, both turned back to the land as a means to express and overcome their anxieties and their traumas. In doing so, they ushered in a new age of British landscape art that produced some of the most original modern art of the second half of the twentieth century. Maybe now, a hundred years after the Nash brothers painted, we need art to return to the landscapes once again, both physical landscapes and our mental ones, in order to help us process this new age of crisis and to offer some fresh air.