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=Paul Nash, a War Artist=

Who is Paul Nash?
Paul Nash was born in London on May 11th 1889. He was influenced by the poetry of William Blake and the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At the outbreak of WW1, he enlisted in the Artist's Rifles (a volunteer regiment of the British Army) and he was then sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second Lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. A few days before the Ypres offensive he fell into a trench; he broke a rib and was invalided home. Whilst recuperating in London, he worked from his front-line sketches to produce a series of drawings of the war. He was recruited by Charles Masterman (head of the government's WPB- War Propaganda Bureau) recruited Nash as an official War Artist. In November 1917 he returned to the Western Front where his drawings resulted in first oil paintings. He died on July 11th 1946 at Boscombe, Hampshire, and remained forever a renowned artist of the First World War.

Paul Nash

What impression of WW1 is portrayed by Paul Nash?
Some of his paintings, for example- A Howitzer Firing, Void (Néan) and The Ypres Salient at Night (shown below) are good examples of what Nash wanted to show of first World War. After the war, and Nash's time spent on the Western Front, his paintings and drawings had radically changed; they weren't the sunny, in bloom paintings that he used to do. They were now blasted and littered with dead people. In a message to his wife he wrote-

"Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be the master of the ceremonies in this war: no glimmer of God's hand is seen. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous mockeries to man; only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds or through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land."

Through his art he wanted to bring home the full horrors of the conflict. This is another quote from a message to his wife-

"I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls."

Both quotes convey the fact that Nash wasn't really an artist, just someone who wanted to show the atrocities of the war.

Paul Nash, //A Howitzer Firing//, oil on canvas, 71 x 91 cm, Imperial War Museum, London. Paul Nash, //Void (Néant)//, 1918, oil on canvas, 71. 4 x 91.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Paul Nash, the Ypres Salient at Night

Three Useful Weblinks

 * http://www.rennart.co.uk/nash.html -
 * http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTnash.htm -
 * http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue6/nash.htm -