Study Interior (1930)

Like so many of Nash’s work this is as much an interior study of Nash’s mind as a study of a front parlour. Is that a face in the fireplace…

Margot Eates dates the work to 1930 and lists the work as ‘Interior Study, Toulon’. The Nashes visited Toulon on the French Riviera for a six-week holiday in February 1930. However, Andrew Causey suggests that the fireplace could also be from Iver Heath, as it bears similarity to an oil painting titled ‘Dahlias’, 1927 (Causey, no.566). Wood Lane House, Iver Heath, was Nash’s home growing up and his father lived there until his death in 1929.

Exhibited: Hamet Gallery, ‘Paul Nash’, March 1970, no.30;
Hamet Gallery, ‘Paul Nash Drawings and Watercolours’, May 1973, no.37.

Literature: Andrew Causey, ‘Paul Nash’, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, no.583, p.400;
Margot Eates, ‘Paul Nash’, John Murray, London, 1973, p.123.

Paul Nash was one of the most individual British artists of his period, taking a distinguished place in the English tradition of deep attachment to the countryside whilst at the same time responding imaginatively to European modernism. He saw himself as a successor of William Blake and Turner. After training at the Slade School he served in the First World War, was wounded, and worked as an Official War Artist, his work including some powerful views of the pitted and shattered landscape of No Man’s Land that rank among the most memorable images of the conflict.

In the 1920s and particularly in the 1930s he was influenced by Surrealism and often concentrated on mysterious aspects of the landscape. For much of this time he lived in rural areas (Kent, Sussex, Dorset), basing his work on scenes he knew well but imaginatively transforming them. However, he continued to be involved in the London art world, and in 1933 he was the prime mover in the formation of Unit One; he also helped to organize and exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. In the Second World War he was again an Official War Artist despite being already very sick with the asthmatic condition that killed him.

Paul Nash’s work has been offered at auction multiple times, the record price for this artist at auction being 507,941 USD for The Two Serpents (Snakes in the Woodpile) sold at Sothebys London in 2011.