Autumn Landscape probably depicts the gentle slopes of either the North Downs in Berkshire or the Chilterns in Buckinghamshire. It is more likely to be the latter, however, and in his autobiographical notes, the period after the Great War includes reference to his ‘discovery of the Chilterns’ at the time when Autumn Landscape was painted. Though Nash was deeply committed to making landscape art which evokes ‘a sense of place’ (or genius loci), he seldom gave precise location references in his titles. Nash’s main home at the time was on the Kent coast in Dymchurch, but he travelled regularly around the home counties, occasionally visiting his brother John Nash, for example, who had moved to Meadle in Buckinghamshire in 1922.

It is a long-understood device among landscape painters, dating no later than the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century, that a subject can be given importance by raising it above the level of the horizon. In Autumn Landscape, the only figure that projects into the overcast sky is the preponderant tree, firmly rooted in the foreground. Its elongated trunk has been brushed in a tonal contrast of grey-blue strokes, which project it forward from the neighbouring low-key areas of paint. The tree’s canopy is sparse, thinned out by a wind which sweeps over nearby foliage. Nash’s main commentator and cataloguer, Andrew Causey, was inclined to regard trees in his work as a humanoid presence. ‘The tree had a presence and power which enabled Nash to use it as a private means of communication.’

At the time he executed Autumn Landscape, Nash was working predominantly in watercolour. In 1923, he produced eleven paintings in oil and thirty-two in watercolour. The paint surface of Autumn Landscape is characterised by a smooth flatness, with extended areas of the surface brushed thinly and in a single direction. This reflects Nash’s watercolour technique – a medium which stains the paper support, rather than building-up and projecting from it as oil on canvas does. Nash was concertedly expanding his facility with oil paint at this time, having made his ‘first presentable oil painting’, The Menin Road (1918, Imperial War Museum), towards the end of the Great War. Like other oil paintings by Nash from the early 1920s, Autumn Landscape is marked by an exploratory use of tone, widening to include accents of acid yellow, and the characteristically subtle handling of paint, creating localised areas of texture by loading the brush and applying it in short strokes.

As with almost all of Nash’s finished oil paintings, this work was preceded by a developed preparatory study in watercolour. The Lonely Tree (1921, Private Collection) precedes Autumn Landscape by two years and was given as a gift to the artist’s father. (An inscription on the work reads ‘Paul to Father 1922’.)