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. Throughout the 1920s Paul Nash and his wife Margaret travelled frequently to France, staying in Paris, Normandy, and Toulon amongst other places. He produced a number of watercolours whilst staying at Rouen. There is an architectural quality in this particular work, which may owe something to the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, an exhibition of whose works was held in London in 1928; the Italian would prove an important influence on Nash, as he also was on the Surrealists. A Rouen watercolour was among the works Nash exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in November that same year, and as The Times critic declared, ‘This is by far the most completely satisfying exhibition by an English artist that we have lately seen.’