DESIGN: Paul Nash | John Nash
- Artist: Paul, John Nash
- Published: 2008
- Publisher: Antique Collectors' Club, Suffolk
- Edition: -
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 22cm
- Pages: 96
- Illustrations: 95 colour and 65 b&w
£12.50
Add to basketDESIGN: Paul Nash | John Nash
The brothers Paul and John Nash, in their very different ways, were a major influence on twentieth century British design. Paul Nash (1889-1946) is now recognised as the most significant war artist of the last century; John Nash (1893-1977) as a plantsman artist.
Both worked as designers and as tutors at the Royal College of Art, Paul encouraging a generation of designer artists that included Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Enid Marx. As a committee member of the Design and Industries Association and President of the newly formed Society of Industrial Artists (now the Chartered Society of Designers) Paul promoted design as no less an art form than the fine arts of painting and sculpture. His clients included London Transport, Shell and Curwen Press and publishers the Nonesuch and Golden Cockerel Presses. John became well known for his Edward Lear influenced humorous illustrations and his superb plant drawings and wood engravings that illustrate innumerable books and publications. Paul Nash and John Nash, Design features over 150 illustrations, including graphic design, textile design, ceramics and glass, many not reproduced before. With descriptions by Brian Webb and an introductory essay by Peyton Skipwith.
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Artists Biography
John Nash was born in London, 1893, and educated at Wellington College. Famously, for such an esteemed artist, he never attended art school; in fact his older brother, Paul Nash, who attended the Slade School of Art, dissuaded John from a more formal training whilst encouraging him, nevertheless, to pursue his early artistic interests in drawing and watercolour.
When John was young the Nash family moved from urban London into the Buckinghamshire countryside near Iver Heath - a gentle terrain of rolling hills, fields with hedgerows and trees which would inform his visual vocabulary, and also provide stimuli for much of the content with which he would become concerned. Here John befriended the artist Claughton Pellew who was to encourage his interests in watercolour, and in the painting of the natural world. Pellew invited John to look - to attend to that which surrounded him; but he also taught by example, for Pellew had a deep, not to say rhapsodic love for the countryside which in many ways John learnt to share.
John first exhibited (1913) at the Dorien Leigh Gallery, London, then with the Camden Town Group (1913-14) and soon after (1915) with The London Group at the Goupil Gallery. These exhibitions met with considerable success and resulted, towards the end of the 1914-18 war, in an invitation from the War Propaganda Bureau to become an Official War Artist. In this capacity John painted his iconic works Oppy Wood and Over the Top - two of the most important and memorable images to have come from the 1914-18 conflict.
Nash started to teach first at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford (1924-29), and then, appointed by William Rothenstien, at the Royal College of Art as Assistant Teacher of Design (1934-1957). Here he met and befriended Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, and with each he enjoyed painting excursions - with Ravilious to the Bristol Docks, and after moving to Wormingford near Great Bardfield, with Bawden to the Essex countryside.
The similarities between John Nash's watercolour work and that of both Ravilious' and Bawden's is clear - with Ravilious's work especially where a gift for understatement, a subtlety of colour and a tonal range well suited to the countryside is particularly evident. Both Nash and Ravilious worked best with watercolours. Lighter than oils, watercolour allows for a subtlety of tone harder to achieve in the denser medium; and water-saturated pigments have, perhaps, a natural sympathy with both artist's chosen focus on an English landscape which is itself so often sodden with moisture.
There is similarity, too, in both Nash's and Ravilious' discernment of underlying structure - the design behind the picture. Nash declared:…'in looking at landscape its abstract features appeal pretty quickly. Although representational, I am primarily interested in the structure underneath...'*; and in his best works it is this strength of underlying structure, or clearly perceived pattern, which is most evident.
Besides acclaim resulting from exhibitions of Nash's watercolour works at the French Gallery London (1933); the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1953); and a major retrospective at The Royal Academy of Arts (1967), Nash was to find critical appreciation through his wood engravings. Nash was an early member of The Society of Wood Engravers and he produced a body of wood engraved illustrations with a particular emphasis on the portrayal of botanical subjects. Amongst these works, and containing some exceptional images, are his engravings for Poisonous Plants: Deadly, Dangerous and Suspect (1927) - a book for which he and his publishers, the Haslewood Press, would receive high acclaim.
Nash was elected Royal Academician in 1951, and received the C.B.E in 1964. He died in September 1977. His work can be found in major art collections around the world.
Artists Biography
A chronology of Paul Nash's life will list his birth in urban London (1889) and his move, soon after, to Iver Heath in the Buckingham countryside. It will note that he attended Bolt Court Commercial Art School and The Slade School of Fine Art (1910-11), and that, subsequent to his training, he produced designs for Roger Fry's Omega Workshops. A chronology will mention his marriage to Margaret Odeh (1914), and the fact that, after the war, he taught in the Design School at the Royal College of Art where his students included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (see Artists). It will also remark the fact that Nash worked in a wide variety of media: oil, watercolour and wood engraving; that he designed book jackets and textiles, and that he worked in ceramics and glass. It will record the date of his death as 1946. But a scan of the first few paragraphs of virtually any book or catalogue on the works of Paul Nash (and a move from neutral chronology to the writer's evaluation of the works) will almost invariably find the word 'important', or a synonym thereof, to describe Paul Nash's place in twentieth century British art.
Nash was important because, in his capacity of Official War Artist in both World Wars, he painted some of the most iconic images: We Are Making a New World in the First World War, and Totes Meer, for example, in the Second; but he is important, too, because he helped introduce the British art establishment and public to the excitements and potentials of European Modernism, and because he helped to create the Surrealist movement in Britain.
Nash's travels between the wars took him to Paris and to Italy. Here he encountered the avant-garde works of Matisse and Picasso, and of Georgio de Chirico who would become a leading inspiration for the Surrealists. Each of these artists would influence Nash's work. In a metaphorical sense Nash travelled towards the same ground as these artists: away, that is, from the representational characteristic of his early work, via the abstract and towards the symbolic as evidenced in his later work.
Nash welcomed what he saw as Surrealism's 'release of the dream', but he did so because, even in his early more representational work, he was interested in that which lay below the surface, or beyond the apparent. When he was young he was attracted to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to Blake and to Samuel Palmer. In particular he identified with the almost mystical engagement and love of the English landscape as depicted by Palmer. What he saw attempted by Palmer was what he always wanted to achieve in his own work: to get to that which lay below or beyond the ordinary, to a portrayal of that which is sometimes designated the genius loci, or the 'spirit' of a place.
Time and again Nash sought to find and depict special 'places' as he called them. The sites he found to portray were often of recognized importance, like the prehistoric Wittenham Clumps or the Avebury Stone Circles; but Nash designated these as special 'places' not for their historical significance. As he wrote:…'there are places...whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which cannot be analysed'.
These enchanted places were, of course, infused with the projections of parts of his own mind. Perhaps it is inevitable that a sensitive observer will colour that which he observes with his own thoughts and emotions. And as such, Nash's paintings can often be seen as dark and melancholic, and his preoccupations with mortality over-riding in theme. Yet there is a quiet lyricism, too - not to say a sense of unalloyed beauty in some of his works (see Wood on the Downs, for instance).
However characterised in content, what Nash's work always evinces is an attempt to go beyond the merely apparent, beyond the surface of things. As he wrote in his autobiography: ..'it was always the inner life of the subject rather than its characteristic lineaments which appealed to me, though that life, of course, is inseparable, actually, from its physical features'.
