Sunrise over Valley depicts a sweeping landscape bathed in the glow of early morning light. Beneath a brilliant cloudscape, the land is mottled with areas of limpid green and silhouetted forms veiled in blue shadow. In the sky above, the rising sun is positioned left of centre and emits a pure radiant light. The precise ripple of brightness and shadow in the clouds has been carefully studied, with Nash using localised areas of blue and grey to heighten the intensity of the highlights around the sun itself. The view is observed from an elevated prospect and, at the lower right of the picture, the receding furrows of the field indicate the ground falling away like contour lines on a map. At the lower left of the picture, a fragment of fencing or farm equipment appears to be wedged into the soil. The atmospheric effects of light are carefully observed in this watercolour and every aspect of the colour and composition is integrated into an ecstatic, poignantly realised moment of sunrise.

According to Andrew Causey, the pre-eminent specialist on Nash’s work, this watercolour was painted at Madams, the Gloucestershire home of his friend Charles and Clare Neilson. The scene faces towards the Cotswolds, which are shrouded in the distance. Nash first met Clare Neilson in 1934 and made his first visit to Madams in June 1938. Causey described the house and its surroundings as ‘one of the major inspirations of his late work’. He used strong terms to evoke the appeal of Madams, describing it as ‘a wartime refuge, a small personal paradise and an escape from the worry and the deprivations of the war which, on top of his declining health, sometimes made [Nash] deeply depressed.’

Nash described Madams in a letter to his wife Margaret on his first visit. ‘This is an enchanting place. A perfect situation, the little house perched up overlooking the hills and valleys. You approach it down a winding drive through a hazel wood but it opens into a clearing with a sweet garden and orchard with the rather mountainous looking Malverns massed on the horizon.’ Having previously used Madams as a pied-à-terre to explore the nearby Severn Valley and the Forest of Dean, in 1941 he turned his attention to the house and its garden and began painting the view. As he wrote to Clare Neilson that year: ‘Take note the name Madams has started on its unknown flight.’ He continued to make watercolours on his visits there until 1944.

Nash believed that the natural world was profoundly underpinned by a unifying spiritual force. Like his contemporaries Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, he was interested by the teachings of Christian Science and he discovered profound feelings of harmony and meaning in repeating cycles of the natural world. Sunrise and sunset, the solstices and the equinoxes, and the phases of the moon were all important themes in Nash’s work of the 1940s. These interests were enforced by Nash’s reading about the Druids at this time, especially in Sir James Frazer’s esoteric history The Golden Bough. Clare Neilson recorded that Nash was reading certain volumes of the book on his stay at Madams in July 1943. It follows that Sunrise over Valley was not simply a picturesque scene but a loaded, profoundly significant subject in Nash’s imagination.

Shortly after it was painted, this work was acquired by Dudley Tooth. From 1938 until his death, Nash’s sole dealer was Arthur Tooth & Son (Dudley was Arthur’s son). He had previously sold his work in solo exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries and between exhibitions at Redfern Gallery. However, in an undated letter, he explained to Redfern’s director Rex Nan Kivell why he preferred to sell his work elsewhere instead:

After careful consideration I came to the conclusion that Tooth's possessed the necessary machinery for solving my problems which involved not only a centralized selling organisation but a relief for me from the whole worrying business of trying to market my own work. This of course is particularly necessary if I am to be out of England for long periods in the future. Last week I approached Tooth's and we had a comprehensive talk the result of which is that I propose to make them, for the time being, my sole agents.

This letter provides a telling insight into Nash’s financial situation and his relationship with Tooth’s. The market for contemporary art in London in the 1930s was badly suppressed; few modern artists lived comfortably at the time and few galleries specialised exclusively in modern art. The security and continuity offered by Tooth’s relieved Nash of the continual burden he felt to sell and promote his work. Sunrise over Valley was one of several works which Dudley Tooth acquired from Nash for his own collection. It was never exhibited publicly during the artist’s lifetime and has for many decades been privately owned by Tooth’s descendants.