Shipyard at Rye was made while Paul Nash and his wife Margaret lived with her ailing, elderly father in the eponymous seaside town in Sussex. Nash had a regular, well-established practice in watercolour and for this painting he adopted a characteristic combination of absorbent, handmade paper, half imperial in size, a few precursory compositional outlines drawn in pencil, and a lucid watercolour painting executed with a dry-brush technique. The subject is an empty shipyard, but the inanimate objects are invested with uncanny psychological agitation. The scene is littered with timber. The composition is framed at left and right by upright wooden planks propped against partially visible huts or shelters. Larger timbers of different colours are unevenly stacked in the foreground, and they produce a shallow diagonal emphasis which contrasts with neighbouring planks that run in a contrary diagonal direction. In the midground, a man-made forest of freestanding trunks is criss-crossed by precarious ladders and timbers hung from metal chains. The intersection of vertical and horizontal lines creates a visual echo of a vacant crucifix, and there is a marked contrast between the busy activity implied by the scene and the absence of human life. Daylight is falling from a high bright sun, the sky is hazy and atmospheric, and the sea is visible in the background at the horizon. The Nash specialist Andrew Causey described Shipyard at Rye as a watercolour ‘in the mainstream of English Surrealism as practised also by Wadsworth and Tristram Hillier’.

This and another work by Nash, A Winter Farm, were first exhibited in a mixed exhibition of watercolours at Thomas Agnew, London, in 1931. It included the work of artists both living and dead, traditional and modernist, amongst them Cozens, Girtin, Rowlandson and Turner; David Young Cameron, Francis Dodd, W. W. Russell and Henry Tonks. Of advanced painters at work in the twenties and thirties, Agnew tended to exhibit those associated with Roger Fry, Bloomsbury and the London Artists' Association (L.A.A.). In this particular exhibition, besides Nash, there was work by Keith Baynes, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Frederick Porter, all of whom were members of the L.A.A. Nash himself had exhibited with that organisation and his inclusion in Agnew’s show indicates the company he kept in the years before he fostered a new avant-garde with Unit 1, which he founded in 1933.

Agnew’s exhibition was reviewed by Apollo and the article made special reference to Shipyard at Rye. The anonymous author drew attention to Nash’s unconventional vision, which ‘pulls one up with a jerk’. His work was ‘of quite a different nature’ from that of his contemporaries Bell, Grant and Porter:

"Mr. Nash’s watercolours are here the only ones which, if not technically, have at all events aesthetically, broken with the tradition. He uses representational elements only in so far as they help his design, which is abstract and as “purely aesthetical” as he can make them without dispensing with representation altogether. In point of fact the drawing that he calls “Rye” [Shipyard at Rye] is superficially truer to “nature” than “A Winter Farm” […]. But in “Rye” the representational element is of far less significance than the abstract play of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, the entertaining advances and recessions which, like certain optical illusions, make the eye drop from the two dimensions into the third almost unawares."

In response to Nash’s work, the reviewer concluded by wondering ‘whether the future of art in general, and of watercolour drawing in particular, will follow this line of evolution.’

In 1937, Nash included Shipyard at Rye in a large solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London. In his foreword to the accompanying catalogue, he outlined his artistic development in the preceding years. ‘A few attempts to escape into the refuge of abstract design proved me unsuited’, he admitted. ‘But at this point I began to discover the significance of the so-called inanimate object.’ In Shipyard at Rye, such are the numerous ladders and timbers, variously strewn on the ground and suspended upright. From such objects, Nash wrote, ‘Nature became endowed for me with new life. The landscape, too, seemed now possessed of a different animation.’

Andrew Causey suggested that Shipyard at Rye was possibly exhibited in Nash’s retrospective exhibition at the Oxford Arts Club in October and November 1931. This suggestion is partly supported by the artist’s pencil inscription on the reverse of the sheet: ‘No. 2/Paul Nash/Landscape at Rye/£26’. However, it was the first catalogued work in the exhibition, not the second, and it was priced at £25, not £26. An annotated copy of the Oxford Arts Club catalogue in the Tate Library states that ‘Landscape at Rye’ was loaned by the Leicester Galleries. Shipyard at Rye was apparently never shown or handled by the Leicester Galleries, and this tells against Causey’s suggestion.

Shipyard at Rye was offered for sale in several exhibitions in the thirties. In Nash’s Redfern exhibition in 1937, it was priced at 25 guineas. It failed to sell, however, and it seems that Nash stopped trying at some stage. In exhibitions after the artist's death, it was loaned as the private property of his wife Margaret Nash.

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Nash’s notes for an unfinished autobiography show that his time living in Rye was an inauspicious period of his life. He and his wife Margaret previously lived in the nearby seaside town of Dymchurch and moved up country in 1925 to the village of Iden, two miles north of Rye. They moved to Rye in 1930 following the deaths of Margaret’s mother and Paul’s father, and then faced the mortal illness of her father:

"Life at Rye is a strain. Sudden fear for Mr. Odeh [Margaret’s father]. He becomes seriously ill. Merciful death. We find ourselves together. We both want a rest. […] Trip to the North [etc.]. Return to Rye. We are both ill, but now we can make a new life. Plans to leave Rye."

Causey took this to be ‘the beginning of a period of restlessness and wandering which lasted till 1936.’ They departed from Rye in 1933, and that was a nadir in some respects: Nash made just three oil paintings and seven watercolours that year.

But the period was not without consolations. They were close to the sea again and Nash ‘was naturally thinking back to Dymchurch themes.’ Paul and Margaret made new friends, and his work took a new course, as he noted:

"New home in a country town. New House. Rye. New friends and neighbours. Una, Lady Troubridge and Radcliffe Hall. Yogi and Yeats Brown. Conrad and Clarissa Aiken. New work. Experiments in abstraction."

The American writer Conrad Aiken played an especially important role in Nash’s creative life at this time. As Margaret wrote in her memoirs, ‘He helped bring Paul back to his real world, the world of poetic vision expressed through the dream, often the fantasy.’ Causey referred to Aiken’s ‘invaluable intellectual support’ and how Nash considered illustrating a book of Aiken’s poems in July 1931. The art critic Anthony Bertram, who was acquainted with the artist, also interpreted Nash’s years in Rye with greater optimism. Nash ‘liked Rye’, Bertram wrote in 1955, and his home at New House was an agreeable one. ‘It was large enough to give quarters for Mr Odeh and a studio for Nash and had many physical comforts as well as a view over the Marsh and the sea, and a terraced garden running down the cliff.’ To judge from the extended working period of a work such as Objects at Rye (1932–37), it seems that Nash continued to reflect on his life at Rye and during his residence there his work underwent important changes that would define his later output.