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watercolour, coloured chalks, pen and ink and pencil

PROVENANCE

A gift from the Artist to Claud Lovat Fraser, 1920 and thence by family descent
Piccadilly Gallery, London
Thos. Agnew & Son, London

EXHIBITED

London, Morley College, The Art of War: 1914-18, 1971, no.17.
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, no.218, p.365 (as 'A War Scene').
CATALOGUE NOTE

Executed in October - November 1917, there are five small caricatures of soldiers on the verso.

The impact of WWI on British visual art cannot be overstated. Virtually all the artists whose work depicted the carnage of the conflict produced work of huge power and significance, whether they were young or old. The roll-call of artists involved reads like a Who's Who of the art world of the nineties and Edwardian years, including painters as diverse as Sargent, Orpen, Nevinson, Bomberg and Roberts. But it is Paul Nash whose work secured him the position of the artist whose vision has remained most closely allied to successive generations' image of the Western Front.

However, Nash's most important work was derived from a short but intense period of exposure at the end of 1917, and the works he produced mark a complete change in his depiction of the war. Having joined the Artist's Rifles in 1914, he had spent the following two and a half years at home, only leaving for Ypres, France in early 1917. The work produced on this trip tended to record some of the devastation, but Nash's period of service was curtailed by an accident which invalided him home with a broken rib. This accident more than likely saved his life, as virtually his entire company was wiped out just over a fortnight later during the ill-fated assault on the notorious Hill 60 salient. Returning to the Front in November 1917, the transformation in the landscape stunned Nash. By November, the Third Battle of Ypres, imprinted on history as Passchendaele, had been raging for over three months and after almost constant rain during the autumn, the ravaged and blasted quagmire seemed like a landscape from another world. British and Empire losses were estimated at between 62,000 and 66,000, with over 175,000 injured. German losses were even higher, with around 83,000 killed and about a quarter of a million men wounded.

On November 16^th Nash wrote to his wife Margaret:

'I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable. In the fifteen drawings I have made I may give you some vague idea of the horror, but only being in it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature and what our men in France have to face....Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all though the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow....the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease....I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will be a bitter truth, may it burn their lousy souls.'

This initial group of works on paper grew to around sixty works, and were the basis for the oil paintings which have become the iconic images of the Western Front. Nash had never received formal instruction in the use of oil paint, and the deliberate and measured application of paint in works such as We are Making A New World (Coll. Imperial War Museum, London) gives an awkwardness to the image that emphasises the unreality of the scene. First shown in the Void of War exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1918, these works immediately secured Nash's position as the leading painter of the war. Herbert Read, who had himself served in France, wrote that he 'was immediately convinced'...that he...'could convey, as no other artist, the phantasmagoric atmosphere of No Man's Land'.

As an official War Artist, virtually all of Nash's wartime output found its way into the collections of public institutions and as such it incredibly rare for works of this period to come onto the market. The present work is a superb example of this very specific period, and with its foreground of trenches and duckboards, blasted stumps and barbed wire, leads the viewer forward into an unreal world of pockmarked earth, shell craters overlapping each other. In the distance battle continues, the flashes of explosions and flares lighting the landscape with an eerie glow.