Signed l.l.: Paul Nash

Watercolour over pencil, 35.5 by 56 cm (14 by 22 ins)

Provenance: Lady Herbert; her sale, Christie’s, 23 December 1953 where acquired by Dr H.P. Widdup; Hamet Gallery; Christie’s, 13 July 1973 (lot 273)

Exhibited: London, The Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings by Paul Nash, November 1932, cat.no.2; Venice, XV Biennale, Exhibition of British Section, June 1938, no.18; Leeds, City Art Gallery and Temple Newsam, Exhibition of paintings, sculpture and drawings by Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth, April - June 1943, cat. no.51; Redfern Gallery, 1963, no.325

Literature: Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall and the Garden of Cyrus. With Thirty Drawings by Paul Nash. Edited with an Introduction by John Carter, Curwen Press, London, 1932, p.112 (for the related work); John Armstrong, Watercolours by Paul Nash at the Leicester Galleries, The Week-end Review, 5 November 1932, p.542; Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p.422, no.752

Nash spent much of the year 1931 working on ideas and drawings to illustrate the work Urn Burial and the Garden of Cyrus by the great seventeenth century polymath and writer Sir Thomas Browne. The result would be the artist’s greatest achievement as an illustrator, the art historian Herbert Read subsequently referring to it as “one of the loveliest contributions to contemporary English art”. The Urn Burial and its subject would though have an influence on Nash that went far beyond the book and its text into his own personal artistic vision and on in his own highly individual take on surrealism. Out of his final illustrations for Urn Burial he developed five larger full-scale watercolours of which one, Mansions of the Dead (Tate Gallery, acc.3204), stands as perhaps one of his most celebrated pictures of the period. The present watercolour is another of these five larger scale works and like the Tate picture prefigured much of Nash’s later visionary work, even forming part of the artist’s submission to the Venice Biennale several years later in 1938.

The related illustration to the present watercolour appears on p.112 in the 1932 edition of Urn Burial that Nash illustrated. Browne’s adjacent text reads: “Whereby whispering places are framed by/ Elliptical arches laid sideways.”