‡Paul Nash (British, 1889-1946) The Corner, 1919 signed in pencil (lower left), titled (to

‡Paul Nash (British, 1889-1946) The Corner, 1919 signed in pencil (lower left), titled (to reverse) pencil, watercolour and chalk with colour notes 55.5cm x 40cm. Provenance: John Nash RA; The Redfern Gallery, London, 1963 as 'Elms over a terrace'; David Bathurst Esq. (former chairman of Christies); Hamet Gallery, London, 1970 as 'Elms over a terrace'; Mr and Mrs F. Shaw. Exhibited: Fitzroy Street, London, 1919 (29); NEAC, London, Jan 1920 (166); Redfern Gallery, London, February 1963 (323); Camden Arts Centre, London, 1969 (57); New Grafton Galleries, London, Oct 1969 nn; Hamet Gallery, London, 1970 (8). Literature: Bertram, Nash, Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1923, p.134, pl. 14; Margot Eates, Paul Nash: The Master of the Image, John Murray Ltd., London, 1973, p.29 and 114; Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p.368, cat. no. 246 (ill. b&w, pl. 428). Paul Nash - The Corner (1919) 'In 1919 Nash was thirty and could have felt that by then the foundations of his career should have been firmly laid. In a sense they were: an intelligent public had acclaimed his exhibition of war pictures the year before: but war art, like the war itself, was forgotten as quickly as events allowed people to put it out of their minds. The war pictures on which his reputation wrested were a narrow base on which to build.' Andrew Causey, Paul Nash (OUP, 1980), 82. The year from which this delicately beautiful watercolour dates was a pivotal one in Nash's career. Ezra Pound had written in August 1918 that Nash's recent 'Void of War' exhibition had probably been 'the best show of war art … that we have had', and this success had made Nash one of the most prominent young artists working in England. Even as 1919 began he was completing his tour de force in oils, The Menin Road, now in the Imperial War Museum. But Nash had both to overcome the strains of the war, and look ahead to what direction he should take next. He later articulated these strains in his autobiography, Outline, as the 'Struggles of a war artist without a war'. Much of 1919 would be devoted to the medium Nash knew best - watercolours - and to his favoured subject: the English landscape. This would be the year of his many great works made at Dymchurch and Romney Marsh, in East Sussex; but as he would also write in Outline, this was the period of his 'Discovery of the Chilterns'. The Corner was painted during a visit he made with his wife Margaret and his brother John to the little village of Whiteleaf, near Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. Trees would be a frequent subject through 1919, as they had been prior to the War: 'I have tried … to paint trees as tho' they were human beings,' he had written to a friend in 1912, 'because I sincerely love & worship trees & know they are people & wonderfully beautiful people'. We may note that the trees from this period are invariably in full growth, filled with leaf and life - so unlike the denuded trunks and stumps that he had illustrated so brutally on the Western Front. The Corner was among the watercolours exhibited in 'Drawings by Paul Nash' held at his temporary studio at 9 Fitzroy Street, London, in November 1919, and it was either bought by or given to his brother. It would be among the works included in 'The English Landscape Tradition' exhibition at that Camden Arts Centre in January 1969, and featured in other posthumous shows. At some point it acquired the improbable title Elms over a Terrace: elm trees had been the subject of some of Nash's most striking pre-War drawings, but as his annotations to the drawing make clear, none of these are elms. We are grateful to David Boyd Haycock for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.