Paul Nash

Paul Nash was born on 11 May 1889 in London. He was educated at St Paul's School, which he left in July 1906, before a period of art training at the Chelsea polytechnic later known as the South-Western Polytechnic, at the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography at Bolt Court, and finally at the Slade School of Art, University College London, which he entered in October 1910. He struggled with figure drawing at the Slade and left after roughly a year, turning instead to the landscape subjects that would define his career; no degree is recorded from any of these institutions.

Nash was appointed an official war artist on the Western Front in 1917, producing images such as We Are Making a New World that became some of the most recognized British art of the First World War. In the 1930s he became a leading figure in British Surrealism, developing a landscape vocabulary built around megaliths, standing stones, and uncanny found objects, and in 1936 he helped organize the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London. He was appointed an official war artist again at the outbreak of the Second World War, working with the War Artists' Advisory Committee on paintings of aircraft, wreckage, and the war in the air.

Nash suffered from severe asthma for most of his adult life. He died on 11 July 1946 at Boscombe, Hampshire, from complications linked to that long-term illness. A memorial exhibition followed at the Tate Gallery, London.

Institutional and curatorial opinion has settled firmly on Nash as a defining figure of Modern British art. York Art Gallery's 2022 to 2023 exhibition Paul Nash and the Uncanny Landscape, curated by John Stezaker, situated his work within the broader context of Surrealism and the English landscape tradition. Tate's 2016 to 2017 retrospective, which later toured to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, was widely reviewed in the British press and reinforced his standing as both a war artist and a modernist landscape painter in the same body of work.

Nash's auction record stands at GBP 937,250 for Encounter in the Afternoon, a 1936 Surrealist painting sold at Christie's in London on 24 June 2008. No later sale has been documented at a higher price through mid-2026. A separate world record for a Nash watercolour, A Drawing (1913), was set at GBP 212,500 at Bonhams in London, a figure well below the overall painting record. His primary-market presence today runs mainly through Piano Nobile in London, which regularly offers his paintings, watercolours, and prints and has included his work at fairs such as TEFAF Maastricht and the Treasure House Fair.

Nash's market runs on comparatively thin auction supply relative to his institutional stature, so the 2008 record for Encounter in the Afternoon has stood for close to two decades without being tested by a comparable painting. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on provenance research through museum holdings such as Tate and the Imperial War Museums, and standard auction house due diligence. Collectors should also expect most available material to surface through UK-based dealers and auction houses rather than a broad international market.