Nash developed a peculiar fascination with aeroplanes at the outbreak of the Second World War. Like most people who stayed at home during the war, Nash’s only experience of conflict was from the air battle, which was conclusively resolved by the Battle of Britain in 1941. Nash came to integrate aircraft within his contemporaneous dreamlike landscape paintings, which were largely based on the scenery around his Oxford home. Though he often used them as formal devices in his richly patterned compositions, aircraft tend to be specified – in this case, the Messerschmidt aircraft is pictured with a Swastika clearly visible on the tail fin and the Balkenkreuz on the wings. This lithograph was printed by the Curwen Press, at the behest of the Ministry of Information, and sold at the National Gallery. Under the direction of Kenneth Clark, the gallery mounted a number of displays intended to rally the spirits of the nation. Clark was chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee, the body associated with the Ministry of Information that was responsible for commissioning war art. Nash was one such artist that received work from the committee, and this lithograph of The Raider on the Moors derives from a watercolour which Nash made in 1940, now in the collection of Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.