The Easel

A Painter of the Shattered World

Paul Nash seems to present to English art critics as a mystery to be solved.  First and foremost he was a painter of the English landscape. But the blasts of modernism from Europe clearly impacted his work. Were his strange landscapes different enough to be called avant-garde? Perhaps not. At career’s end we see “less Nash the pioneer [and more] Nash the painter of an odd, spiritualized, peculiarly English countryside”.