River and Trees is a wintry evocation of the River Seine in Paris. In his biographical monograph about Nash, Anthony Bertram wrote: ‘Just before the Christmas of 1924 the Nashes went to Paris and early in 1925 on to Cros-de-Cagnes, which Lance Sieveking had recommended to them as Nash country and Nash colouring in particular.’ It was during this passing visit to Paris that Nash made River and Trees. The art historian Andrew Causey noted that Nash made this work along with three others while staying with his wife at the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, Paris, in December 1924 and January 1925.

The bridge that appears obliquely on the right-hand side of River and Trees is the Pont Royale. The metropolis has been suppressed in favour of the water’s surface and foliage at the riverbank: any sense of noise, bustle and human activity has been carefully pared away. Although the Hôtel faces the Musée du Louvre, Nash excises this from the upper right-hand corner of the picture. The work bears comparison with another picture of a bridge, which Nash made a few years later in 1928. Rouen (fig. 1) also makes a pictorial virtue of foreshortening, with the length of the bridge, its arches and buttresses, collapsed into a tightly compacted area. The dynamic sweep of the bridge in Rouen is emphatic, by contrast with River and Trees where the bridge produces a counterpoint with the sloping line of the riverbank. In both cases, Nash’s handling of his medium enabled him to achieve delicate modulations and an accurate impression of colour and movement in the waters of the river.

As with much other modernist art of the twenties, River and Trees emphasises the formality of the picture while remaining truthful to external appearances. With a graphite pencil, Nash used areas of refined parallel hatching accumulatively to create a silvery effect, depicting both the eddies in the water and deep reflections cast by objects on the riverbank. These sets of mark-making overlap and cut across each other. A sense of the river’s flow is also suggested by the steeply inclined perspective, a consequence of Nash’s elevated viewpoint from a hotel room looking down: the slanting diagonal of the river implies movement. Localised rubbing away was used to create highlights in the river’s calm, glass-like surface. The pale tonality of the image stems from a disciplined restriction of the palette, with only pencil grey and pastel shades of pink and blue at play, and this produces a convincing and atmospheric sense of winter. The overall effect of the work is characteristic of Nash, reconciling a personally distinctive vocabulary of forms (spindly mark-making, angular compositions, delicate colouring) with an acute sense of the natural world, the animation of trees and water, and the peculiar qualities of light and atmosphere.