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signed with monogram

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Mayor Gallery, London (as Mirrored Hall) whence purchased by the family of the present owner, September 1966
CATALOGUE NOTE

Apparently unrecorded in the majority of the literature of Nash's work, the present painting appears to correspond with an untraced work, Convolvulus, referred to in Nash's manuscript Notebook I, now in the archive of the Tate Gallery. If these two are identical, then the present work must be dated to 1930, a date that stylistically seems perfectly compatible with this conclusion.

The use of mirrored surfaces within interiors reflecting spaces beyond the sight of the viewer is a motif that appears in Nash's work from the earlier years of the 1920s. The first major painting to include this motif was Mirror and Window of 1924 (Private Collection, London), where a dressing-table mirror reflects an abstracted view of part of the room in opposition to the pastoral landscape seen through the window, but it is not until later in the decade that Nash began to experiment more with this motif. The contrast of organic nature and constructed image is found particularly in a group of paintings of interiors of circa 1927-28, such as Cactus (Coll. Harrogate Art Gallery) and Autumn Crocus (Private Collection), and most famously in Dead Spring (Coll. Pallant House, Chichester) of 1929. The artist's growing interest in both surrealism and the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth century author, antiquarian and physician in the late 1920s informed many of his attempts to incorporate abstraction within his work, but Nash seems to have found this synthesis most successful when the abstraction was developed from a specific observed starting point and would often produce watercolour studies which formed the basis for oils some time later. The infinite recession of images seen in the present work uses the optical illusion created when the viewer is placed between two mirrors and, if the 1930 date posited is correct, may link the present work with the slightly later Voyages of the Moon (Coll. Tate Gallery, London), of 1934-37. Although later in date, Voyages of the Moon derives its imagery from the tall mirrored walls of the dining room at the Hotel du Port et des Negociants at Toulon, where Nash and his wife had stayed in February of 1930, along with Edward Burra and their friend Ruth Clark. Mirrored surfaces seem to have also fascinated Burra on this same trip, as can be seen in Three Sailors at a Bar (Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London), although they are rather the backdrop to the somewhat louche environs of a bar than the main subject. The arched top to the mirror in Mirrored Hall with Convolvulus also echoes the large looking-glass which dominates the left-hand side of the important surrealist Harbour and Room (Coll. Edward James Foundation), painted c.1932-36 but again connected to the 1930 Toulon trip. By placing the still-life of convolvulus directly in front of the mirror-glass, both it and the butterfly which flutters above are immediately reflected back at us, giving an unsettling shifted image to the foliage. In addition to creating the illusion of infinite space, closer inspection also reveals to us that our view of the smallest element in the composition, the butterfly, counters what would normally be impossible, that we can see both top and bottom of the insect simultaneously. This effect was one that Nash would reuse most famously in his Landscape from a Dream (Coll. Tate Gallery, London) of 1936-38.