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.

Having served three years on the home front as a Lieutenant with the Artists Rifles Regiment, Paul Nash was sent to the Western front in France as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment in early March 1917. On the 25th May 1917, whilst sketching on a parapet, Nash tripped in the darkness and fell into a trench, breaking his ribs and was invalided home. Mere days later, his regiment was decimated under an enemy barrage during a futile forward push. As a result of the success of his June 1917 exhibition of watercolours he produced whilst a serving officer at the Front, Nash was recruited by the Ministry of Information. In October, Nash returned to the Front as an Official War Artist, visiting Passchendaele, where the terrain was reduced to a no-man’s land. Aghast at the obliteration of nature all around him, he transformed his Romantic landscape style and became committed to an outright condemnation of war. ‘It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless’, he told his future wife Margaret in 1917. ‘I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’

Nash’s official war works were well-received by critics after his exhibition in May 1918 in the Leicester Galleries entitled ‘Void of War’. “In his pictures he is usually a romantic artist with a very definite convention,” wrote the critic for The Times, but “in these works his romance has turned to irony: ‘This is a beautiful and wonderful world, he seems to say; and see what man has made of it.’ See also how even man’s insanity cannot rob the tortured and battered earth of its beauty. In many of his drawings he has been struck by the strange, unaccountable beauty of the meaningless shapes of things so tortured and battered. You feel that it has been seen with frightened eyes, eyes frightened at the inhumanity of it. It is waste – the waste of worlds, of ages, which look as if it had been made by some indifferent will of Nature. And then we remember that it has been made by man in his babyish will to power. That is the effect these drawings have on us. They, like all good drawings of the war, might be used in the propaganda for a league of peace.”

Whilst at the Front, Nash worked feverishly, putting himself in extreme danger according to the memoirs of his wife Margaret. His determination to sketch, draw or paint within close proximity to the actual action of war resulted in mud splattering some of his works on paper. These works, created in the heat of battle, imbued with the terrified vitality of fear, anger and anguish were furiously captured in chalks, and frequently later worked up with pen, pencil and watercolour. He wrote to his wife: “I found the only way to work here was in rapid sketches and I have used nothing but brown paper and chalks”. 'Shellburst, Zillebeke' was part of a sketchpad that Nash worked on whilst in the trenches and as such this painting is an extraordinary piece of artistic history.

'Shellburst, Zillebeke' is among Nash’s most ominous works to result from his time at Passchendaele. A darkly dense brown cloud creeps in from the upper left, seemingly about to plunge the landscape into an even more acute darkness. Shells burst in the distance, offering brief streaks of illumination. The landscape betrays the duration of this barrage – trees have become blackened stumps, appearing as a sea of threatening stakes, whilst the earth itself has turned into waves of churned mud. The explosions of the shells briefly light up patches of the landscape and trench walls with menacing shades of orange and blood red. Nash describes the rain through brutal diagonal streaks of black and white chalk, shooting down like spears upon the soldiers. The landscape itself has become their enemy. The two soldiers in the left foreground huddle down in their trench, braced against the cold, whilst a third soldier, just cropped by the right edge of the painting, looks out towards the desolated no-man’s land. The soldiers in this painting are unusually distinct for Nash’s landscapes: although we cannot see their faces, their body language is powerfully legible, freezing cold, fearful but fatalistically submissive to mechanised warfare.