Paul Nash, 1889-1946 by Margot Eates

Paul Nash: 1889-1946 by Margot Eates with an appreciation by Cecil Day Lewis. 

Published by W&J Mackay Limited, Chatham, 1973. 

No full-scale study of his life and work has appeared for nearly twenty years, and the Paul Nash Trustees felt that the time had come for a reappraisal of his achievements. They accordingly invited Margot Eates, who had edited the Paul Nash Memorial Volume and knew him well towards the end of his life, to undertake this new, fully illustrated monograph. In it, she traces Paul Nash's artistic development in relation to his background and personality, and in a long appendix, she has attempted the difficult task of producing a workable chronology covering over one thousand of his recorded paintings and drawings.

From the time he achieved fame as the most individual and expressive of the artists who recorded the battlefields of the First World War until his premature death in 1946, Paul Nash was always a leading and often controversial figure in modern English art. His complete integrity of vision, his sturdy individualism, and his remarkable ability to evoke the dwelling spirit of his subject—a quiet woodland scene, a menacing prehistoric site, a strange objet trouvé, or monstrous bombers on the ground or in the air—set him somewhat apart from his contemporaries.