Signed and dated l.r.: Tom Nash/35 and inscribed and signed (verso) In the Park/Tom Nash

Gouache, 37 by 55 cm (14 ½ by 21 ¾ ins)

Provenance: Mr John Sassoon

Exhibited: Reading Museum and Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings Tom Nash (1891-1968), December 1979-January 1980, no.30

Nash’s style is closely associated with his exact Slade contemporary and hero Stanley Spencer. Like the work of both Spencer (particularly his early work) and his brother Gilbert (with whom Nash briefly shared lodgings) his primary influences were the Italian primitives, particularly Giotto. Something of Giotto’s purity is evident in Nash’s work - always inventive in composition and executed in a distinctive style that puts form and colour above detail. Nash exhibited widely particularly at the New English Art Club and was represented by the Redfern Gallery, who gave him his first one-man show in 1926 and exhibited over 150 of his pictures. The Contemporary Art Society acquired two of his works in the early 1930s for the collections of the Harrogate Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Reading Museum and Art Gallery in 1980. Much of Nash’s work is strongly religious in theme, but perhaps his more successful paintings are his modern pastoral subjects (such as the present work), which perfectly convey the late Romantic world of the rural idyll.