Through the 1930s, Nash’s landscapes became increasingly surreal in their conception, though he had long had an interest in what he felt existed within, or beyond, certain special places. In his essay ‘Unseen Landscapes’, published in Country Life in 1938, he wrote of landscapes that are unseen not because they are invisible or part of the unconscious, but that are unseen …merely because they are not perceived… To discover, for instance, the landscape of bleached objects is to open up endless possibilities of fresh adventure… But, you may protest, who in the world wants to bother their sight or understanding about a bleached object? That, however, is an entirely different matter. All these things under consideration here – stones, bones, empty fields, demolished houses and back gardens – all these have their trivial feature, as it were, their blind side; but, also, they have another character, and this is neither moral nor sentimental nor literary, but rather something strange and – for want of a better word, which may not exist – poetical. Nash’s vision had always been deeply personal, but the works from this period became increasingly elusive as he became immersed in surrealism, and as he pursued a consuming love affair with the painter Eileen Agar. Early in 1933, Nash suffered a severe asthma attack and doctors advised that he should leave Rye. It was felt that the damp climate was bad for his health. As Margaret packed up their house that summer, a friend took Paul to Marlborough, Wiltshire, where he visited the Avebury stone circles for the first time – a complex terrain of enormous standing stones, avenues and burial mounds that he would explore thoroughly. Along with Maiden Castle in Dorset, it reignited his fascination with prehistoric Britain and the deep history attached to certain places. It also helped inspire a series of works in which outsized or incongruous objects appear in the landscape, including Landscape with Eggs. The central object depicted in this work is perhaps a large flint or maybe a root ball. Though historically treated as either a pleasant view or the backdrop to events, Nash successfully transformed landscape into a living and breathing organism. His landscape paintings are notable for changing commonplace natural objects into fulsome visual events, and though it is identified as a ‘landscape’, Landscape with Eggs borrows from the still-life genre. Comparable works from the period include Event on the Downs (1934, Government Art Collection) and Landscape of the Megaliths (1934, British Council), which similarly treat rotten tree stumps and standing stones as personalities set in a wide open expanse. Beneath the forms at the centre of the work, Nash has laid out a rectangular groundsheet. It is neatly ruled with a grid and, in passing, it might suggest a picnic blanket. Nash developed this manner of ruling grids in the early nineteen-thirties, in works such as this, having introduced the theme of geometry in still-life work from the late nineteen-twenties. (Comparably, a painting like Lares (1929-30, Tate Collection) splices an ordinary fireplace with a set square and try square.) Another work on paper to use the grid-lined floor plan was Study for Landscape of Bleached Objects (1934, Private Collection). A related oil of that title, Landscape of Bleached Objects (c. 1934, Auckland Art Gallery), includes egg-like rocks closely comparable to those in Landscape with Eggs. This work is addressed to ‘my friend’ E.L.T. Mesens, the expatriate Belgian writer and artist who effectively ran the surrealist movement in England from his position as manager of the London Gallery in Cork Street.