Wood and Hill was made during a period when Nash was experimenting with a wide range of styles, including geometric abstraction and Surrealist dreamscapes, following his visit to Paris in 1930. The pastoral subject of a wooded hill carries the memory of Wittenham Clumps, a pair of tree-topped hills in Berkshire that were of special and lifelong importance to the artist. In Wood and Hill, the composition of the landscape is underpinned by the intersection of two isosceles triangles: the steeply receding, wedge-shaped wood in the foreground tessellates with the equally wedge-like hill that appears above it and beyond in the distance. Within this formalised structure which Nash laid out in an underlying armature of pencil lines, the landscape is elaborate with detail – from the diminutive gateway at the lower right of the picture to the swirling branches of the wood. Nash was never a partisan in the style wars between Surrealism and abstraction, and he worked in both idioms. In contrast to the structural clarity of this work, Wood and Hill also exhibits certain traits of Surrealist picture-making. The radical distortion of proportions is most evident and the wood in the foreground is heavily foreshortened, creating a rapid, even dizzying sense of recession. Beside the wood, the gateway is significantly smaller than the wood, suggesting that the trees have grown fantastically large. Nash’s landscape works were conceived in the artist’s imagination, a response to a landscape rather than a detailed transcription of it. This work was first acquired by Eleanor Doorly, who later served for several years as a teacher at North London Collegiate School (NLCS). The work has not been on public display since the artist’s lifetime when it was included in a large retrospective exhibition of his work held at Temple Newsam House near Leeds in 1943.