LANDSCAPE UNDER SNOW
signed John Nash. lower left
watercolour on paper
52.5 x 36.5cm; 20 3/4 x 14 1/2in
57 x 74cm; 22 1/2 x 29 1/4in (framed)

Property from a Private Collector, West London

Provenance
Commissioned from the artist by the grandfather of the present owner in the late 1950s

Executed in the 1950s, the current owner's grandfather commissioned Nash to paint the present subject after receiving a Christmas card from the artist of the view. Opening the Christmas missive he was immediately captured by the harmonious composition, the snow-capped trees, rolling hills blanketed by white powder and the mauve shadows cast across the landscape in the card, and asked Nash to develop the composition into a larger format. Nash duly obliged, scaling up the drawing and adding washes of watercolour to fully realise the image that has become a stand-alone depiction of an idyllic winter's morning.

Four watercolours by John Nash from a Private Collection (lots 34-37)

Introduction
Painter, wood engraver, lithographer and illustrator, Nash is best known much celebrated for his landscape paintings and observations of the natural world.

As a boy he moved with his family from urban London to the Buckinghamshire countryside near Iver Heath, a village boasting a gentle terrain of rolling hills, acres of fields, and verdant trees which would inform his visual vocabulary for the rest of his life. Here Nash befriended fellow artist Claughton Pellew (1890-1966) who was to encourage his interests in watercolour and painting the natural world.

Schooled at Wellington College, Berkshire, Nash was dissuaded from studying at art school by his brother Paul Nash (1889-1946) who was attending the Slade and found the rigid structure of formal training oppressive. Instead, John studied botany, an interest he had nurtured since childhood after winning a botany prize and subsequently calling himself an ‘artist plantsman’.

During the First World War Nash served in the Artist's Rifles on the front lines, and although deterred from recording his experiences at the time, he began to materialise his experiences from memory when he returned to England in 1917. He was appointed an Official War Artist in 2018, the same year that he completed his oil Over the Top (Collection of the Imperial War Museum), of soldiers clambering from their trenches to engage with the enemy.

That same year too Nash married Christine Kühlenthal whom he had met eighteenth months prior. Before he returned from the war, the couple pledged they would marry if he came back alive and, privately, that their shared life would be at once both intimate and free. In their ideal future, each might well have other ‘outside loves’ and their alliance was to be a convention-defying undertaking. Their wedding gave legal form to a relationship that would endure for fifty-eight years; a deep personal commitment, but not an acceptance of ties that bind.

After the War Nash became the first art critic of the London Mercury magazine, held his first solo-exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1921, and associated with several small artistic circles including the London Group and the Cumberland Market Group in Camden. During the Second World War, Nash was again appointed a War Artist, this time serving as a Captain in the Royal Marines. After the War he and Christine moved to Essex. He joined the staff of the Royal College of Art, taught alongside Henry Collins, Cedric Morris, Lett Haines and Roderic Barrett at Colchester Art School and founded the Colchester Art Society of which he later became President.

Throughout his married life his excursions into the countryside to work en plein air were frequently accompanied by his wife who would find suitable vistas. Nash would then make a sketch on the spot as the basis of a work that he would later complete in his studio. The support of the endlessly forbearing Christine would make possible a career of great richness spanning six decades. As John Rothenstein. art historian and Tate Director, recalled, half a haystack interested him as much as a mountain range, and half of his best works can be traced to locations within walking distance of his long-term homes in the Chilterns and the Stour Valley.