Inscribed verso: Pond near Kimble and with further annotations and colour notes

Pen and ink with grey wash and pencil, 26 by 21 cm (10 ¼ by 8 ¼ ins)

This recently discovered drawing is one of a small but significant group of landscape pictures executed by Nash in and around the Buckinghamshire Chilterns in circa 1919. Identified drawings from this period include the landscapes Avenue in the Fields and Early Spring, Fulmer (see Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p.365 ff, nos.239 and 248 ), both of which employ the same graphic shading on the tree trunks and pathways as well light brush and ink work to suggest the bare early Spring branches. Much of his landscape work at this date was executed as a distraction from The Menin Road, the major war painting he was finishing for the British War Memorials Committee and arguably the artist’s landmark early masterpiece. Nevertheless, his landscape work at this date is far from insignificant and the motifs of clusters of trees, ponds and pathways through woodlands remained strongly in evidence in his woodcuts, paintings and watercolours, as well as the work he did as an illustrator (for example in the Sun Calendar in 1920). Within a few years he would abandon the pen and ink work that underpin drawings such as these in favour of the application of purer watercolour.

Kimble near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire features as a location in a number of pictures by Nash at this date. Most of these are (significantly) also landscapes with ponds. These include the eponymous landscape Pond at Kimble dated by Causey to 1921 (Private Collection, see Causey op.cit, p.376, no.324) and a later oil from c.1924 based on this subject known as The Pond (Private Collection, see Causey op.cit. p.386, no.428).