Paul Nash (1889-1946) was born in London, and spent much of his childhood in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, before studying at the Slade School of Art, London under the infamous Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, alongside an exceptionally talented pre-war generation of artists which included Stanley Spencer, C. R.W. Nevinson, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Edward Wadsworth. He served in the Artists' Rifles during World War I until he was invalided home following a fall, and returned tothe front as an Official War Artist. He was a member of the London Group from 1914, co-founded Unit One with Ben Nicholson in 1933 and was a founder of the Modern English Watercolour Society. From the early 1930s he was a leading proponent of British Surrealism and organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, and during World War II he worked again as an Official War Artist. He died in 1946 in Boscombe, Hampshire, succumbing to the severe asthma that afflicted him for most of his adult life.

One of Nash’s earliest extant drawings, 'A Lane in Blue' marked an important step forward. Made at Yateley, Hampshire, Andrew Causey has described it as ‘Nash’s earliest landscape in which the fall of light and shade gives the scene a distinctive mood … There is not much detail and no obviously strange or discordant element; the artist drew only from what he saw, but he selected his information in such a way that the subject ceased to be an ordinary place and its uniqueness was revealed.’

Nash clearly considered 'A Lane in Blue' a significant work in his development as an artist: it would be exhibited at his first solo show, held at the Carfax Gallery in London in November 1912, and again at his retrospective exhibition at the Oxford Arts Club in 1931.

The nature of place plays a significant role in almost all of Nash’s mature work. He explored the idea in his autobiography, where he discussed visits to Kensington Gardens made in early childhood. ‘Here I became aware of trees, felt the grass for the first time, saw an expanse of water, listened to a new kind of silence.’ And it was there that he discovered what he called "my first authentic place … There are places, just as there are people and objects and
works of art, those relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which
cannot be analysed. This place of mine was not remarkable for any unusual features
which stood out. Yet there was a peculiar spacing in the disposal of the trees, or it was
their height in relation to these intervals, which suggested some inner design of very
subtle purpose, altogether defeating the conventional lay-out of the Gardens and
ignoring their respectable character. In that it was like a wild streak in a well-broughtup
family, a break-away from tradition. Simply, it was not the same as the rest."

These words effectively describe Nash himself; but they also describe much of the work of his life – one spent ever in search of such special places, where what is seen is not quite like anything else that surrounds it.

It was also in this year, 1910, that Nash first met the artist William Rothenstein, who advised Nash to go to the Slade. ‘You were very right about the feeling which comes’, Nash wrote to
Rothenstein, ‘the desire to draw for the sake of drawing. I begin to feel it but as yet I am very uneasy and laborious.’