Paul Nash 1889-1946

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat.no. L5.

Encouraged by artist and lecturer, William Rothenstein, Sir Michael Sadler attended an exhibition at Dorien Leigh Gallery in 1915 and purchased two works by Paul Nash. A friend and collector of Wassily Kandinsky, he was the President of the radical Leeds Art Club, and a great champion of modern art in Britain. As a long-standing client of the Leicester Galleries (they had an exhibition of his print collection in 1944) it is probable that this print was purchased, along with ‘A Shell Bursting, Passchendaele’, from the gallery, conceivably from the 1918 ‘Void of War’ exhibition.

The subject of ‘German Double Pill Box, Gheluvelt’ is the aftermath of an offensive in the battle of Passchendaele. Among the units involved were the 15th Hampshires, whom Nash would join in early 1917. In the battle the unit were ordered to seize a position close to the German position of Tower Hamlets, an area of camouflaged concrete ‘pill-box’ machine gun posts. In letters to the British War Memorials Committee Nash described the subject that also inspired his monumental work, ‘The Menin Road’:

The picture shows a tract of country near Gheluvelt village in the sinister district of ‘Tower Hamlets’, perhaps the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat. no. L3.

Zillebeke is a village south of Ypres, Belgium. In November 2014, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards suffered huge losses defending the village which played a pivotal role in preventing the Central Powers breaking through to the coast. By the time Nash arrives on the Ypres Salient in early 1917, the landscape has seen much heavy shelling and the ground is impassable. Here, a spotlight lights the scene, with figures walking with heads bowed through the rain, the light shining off the waterfilled craters and the lake beyond. The broken tree trunks stand like tomb stones as symbols of the fallen.

Greenwood, Jeremy. The Wood-Engravings of Paul Nash. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Wood Lea Press, 1997. cat no. G103.

Paul Nash first visited the Kent village of Dymchurch in 1919. “A delightful place with much inspiring material for work” he subsequently moved his family there in 1921. The lofty broad seawall protects the low lying and ancient area of Romney Marsh from flooding. Running for six kilometres, nine metres high and six metres wide the monumental wall was originally constructed in Roman times with the great Martello towers added in the Napoleonic era after the threat of invasion. Three sluices gates in the wall allowed the water on the wetland to run out at low tide. Nash, who nearly drowned as a child, wrote of his fear and fascination with the sea; ‘cold and cruel waters, usually in a threatening mood, pounding and rattling along the shore’. This feeling of dread can be sensed in his works of Dymchurch with a strange low evening light casting long shadows.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat. no. W.79.
Greenwood, Jeremy. The Wood-Engravings of Paul Nash. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Wood Lea Press, 1997. cat no. G.76.

The design is almost identical to the oil painting ‘Bouquet’ painted a year later (Causey 597, repr The Studio , Nov 1928, p.360 as ‘Still Life’).