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. 'The Orchard' was one of Nash’s last paintings made before the outbreak of war, with distinct reference to Gauguin, confirming Nash as avant garde in everything but name. It was probably produced during the three-week holiday in the north of England he made in late July with his fiancée, Margaret Odeh (who appears, nude, at the left of the picture). During this holiday, Nash made a series of watercolours of orchards, some with ladders leaning against the tree trunks in preparation for the summer harvest. On his return home Nash volunteered almost immediately with the Artists’ Rifles Regiment. In December he married Margaret, and according to her memoir, during this period she found ‘his soul sickened by the routine and daily disciplines of Army life … In all his spare moments he painted and drew, almost feverishly, when the news was bad from the front’.