Paul Nash

Harbour and Room is among the most significant works of surrealist art produced by a British artist, ranking alongside the pictorial distortions of Paul Nash’s European contemporaries such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. The imagery of Harbour and Room is poignant and original. It shows an inconspicuous hotel room with its end wall removed to reveal the harbour outside. The scene is atmospheric and takes place at night: the waters are inky black, as is the sky with its dappled cloud. Where earlier works by Georges Braque and Ben Nicholson had stretched the elastic of reality, using the framing device of a window to bring the outdoors inside, Nash made a literal breakthrough, dissolving the wall altogether. The midground is dominated by a gently stylised French destroyer, viewed from the side; its tall mast rises to fill the space at the centre of the picture. Just behind the ship’s prominent black chimney stack, the white bow of another military ship drifts into view. Beyond are the harbour wall and indistinct, low-lying buildings ranged along it. The distinguishing feature of Harbour and Room is the subtly contrived intermingling of interior and exterior spaces. The scale of the ship and the quayside building are reduced to suit the proportions of the room. To make it visually coherent within such a confined space, the steamer was made small enough so that – if it were to continue its passage – it would comfortably fit through the opening of the fireplace that faces it across the room. The foreground is dominated by exposed floorboards on the left, which are shorn away by the strong diagonal of the harbour’s incoming tideline. The receding orthogonal lines of the floorboards become submerged and are visible up to a point, but their sharply defined lines are gradually replaced by gentle wavelets, completing the transition of room into harbour. The disparate elements of the scene are further brought together by Nash’s uniform treatment of the scene in a characteristic style of simplified naturalism, with details such as the rungs of the ship’s gantry and the mirror’s decorated frame described clearly and attentively. The shimmering reflections and gentle lapping motion in the water’s surface are evoked with technical dexterity, with Nash harnessing the medium’s transparency and the paper’s brilliant whiteness. In the autumn of 1929, Paul and his wife Margaret Nash went on holiday to France. In Paris they met a number of artists who had been or were associated with the Surrealist movement, among them Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Max Ernst and Jean Arp. ‘Paul, for the first time,’ Margaret wrote later, ‘became really interested in an aspect of Surrealist painting, namely, the release of the dream.’ From Paris they went on to the Mediterranean port city of Toulon, staying in February 1930 at the Hôtel du Port. Their room, with its view of the harbour and the French fleet, was the inspiration for Harbour and Room, which was one of Nash’s earliest surreal pictures – ‘to my mind’, wrote Margaret, ‘a very beautiful picture, depicting a French Man o’War sailing into our bedroom; the idea resulting from the reflection of one of the ships in the very large mirror which hung in front of our bed.’ It is unclear how closely the interior in Harbour and Room resembles the Toulon hotel room that inspired it, but the inclusion of a mirror on the left-hand wall is significant, hinting to the reflection that prompted this synthesis of interior and exterior. This watercolour later served as the basis for an almost identical oil painting by Nash, also entitled Harbour and Room. The two pictures are identical in all but minor details (the oil painting has a tiled floor rather than floorboards and it gives a more detailed treatment of the ship and distant harbour buildings). The Nash specialist Andrew Causey has shown that the painting post-dated this watercolour by several years. While the watercolour was made during and after his stay in Toulon, the painting was not completed until 1936. Nash sometimes developed his watercolours into oil paintings, though watercolours were never conceived as mere preparatory studies: they invariably came first and often exhibited a freshness of colour and execution, by contrast with the structured, carefully patterned brushwork of the oils. The critical consensus is that the watercolour of Harbour and Room is superior to the oil. In 1973, Margot Eates wrote: ‘The watercolour version of the painting is somewhat more successful […] because the relative swiftness of the medium made it possible to ‘lay the image’ […] before it eluded the painter.’ Similarly, writing in 2011, David Fraser Jenkins reflected: "Some critics have written that the watercolours were usually better, and here the watercolour of Harbour and Room has been chosen in preference to the Tate’s oil version – in this case because the invading sea, the subject of this painting, appears more convincing when rendered in the transparency of watercolour." The scene in Harbour and Room apparently belongs to the realms of imagination. In contrast with the literally representational landscapes and still lifes that Nash produced up to this point in his career, the picture’s imagery is markedly dream-like. The picture suggests a transitional state (between interior/exterior, waking/sleeping, living/dying, etc.), and the encroaching waters of the harbour are perhaps a metaphor for drifting off to sleep. Causey argued that the subject matter of Harbour and Room grew from Nash’s conscious ‘attempt to deepen the intellectual basis of his painting’. The American writer Conrad Aitken lived near the Nashes at Rye and became good friends with Nash in 1930, and Causey used the influence of Aitken and Jean Cocteau to justify a symbolic interpretation of Harbour and Room: "For Nash, the reflection of the boats in the mirror in Harbour and Room is a representation of death; not of absolute death, but the strengthening resignation to sleep and the unconscious. […] In Harbour and Room the water represents death in the sense of the nightly resignation to sleep, dream, and the unconscious […]." Nash once referred to surrealism as ‘that much-worried word’. When required to define it, he offered the explanation given by the movement’s founder André Breton. As Nash explained in an essay of 1936, ‘[Breton] has attempted to convey an idea of surrealism by suggesting that a statue in a street or some place where it would be normally found is just a statue, as it were, in its right mind; but a statue in a ditch or in the middle of a ploughed field is then an object in a state of surrealism […]. It has, in fact, the quality of a dream image, when things are so often incongruous and slightly frightening in their relation to time or place.’ Nash was closely involved with the organisation of the First International Exhibition of Surrealism, which was held in London in 1936; on that occasion Magritte called him the ‘Master of the Object’. Harbour and Room is dated 1931 and was presumably completed that year. Causey suggested that the work ‘may have been partly completed in 1930’, since it was in 1930 that Nash stayed in Toulon. Beneath the sensitive, dry-brushed watercolour surface, traces of a detailed transfer grid are visible. A lattice of horizontal, vertical and diagonal pencil lines provided an armature for the composition. This exacting technique shows how Nash transferred detailed studies from a sketchbook and related drawings and watercolours that he worked on in Toulon. Causey records eight disbanded sheets from a Toulon sketchbook that Nash kept, and a small number of watercolour drawings show motifs similar to those found in Harbour and Room, including one of ships.