Paul Nash (1889-1946) was born in London, and spent much of his childhood in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, before studying at the Slade School of Art, London under the infamous Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, alongside an exceptionally talented pre-war generation of artists which included Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, William Roberts, and Edward Wadsworth. He served in the Artists' Rifles during World War I until he was invalided home following a fall, and returned to the front as an Official War Artist. He was a member of the London Group from 1914, co-founded Unit One with Ben Nicholson in 1933 and was a founder of the Modern English Watercolour Society. From the early 1930s he was a leading proponent of British Surrealism and organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, and during World War II he worked again as an Official War Artist. He died in 1946 in Boscombe, Hampshire, succumbing to the severe asthma that afflicted him for most of his adult life. Having served three years on the home front as a Lieutenant with the Artists Rifles Regiment, Paul Nash was sent to the Western front in France as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment in early March 1917. On the 25th May 1917, whilst sketching on a parapet, Nash tripped in the darkness and fell into a trench, breaking his ribs and was invalided home. Mere days later, his regiment was decimated under an enemy barrage during a futile forward push. As a result of the success of his June 1917 exhibition of watercolours he produced whilst a serving officer at the Front, Nash was recruited by the Ministry of Information. In October, Nash returned to the Front as an Official War Artist, visiting Passchendaele, where the terrain was reduced to a no-man’s land. Wytschaete, a small village in Flanders, was the scene of heavy fighting during the battle of Messines. Aghast at the obliteration of nature all around him, he transformed his Romantic landscape style and became committed to an outright condemnation of war. ‘It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless’, he told his future wife Margaret in 1917. ‘I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’ Nash’s official war works were well-received by critics after his exhibition in May 1918 in the Leicester Galleries entitled ‘Void of War’. “In his pictures he is usually a romantic artist with a very definite convention,” wrote the critic for The Times, but “in these works his romance has turned to irony: ‘This is a beautiful and wonderful world, he seems to say; and see what man has made of it.’ See also how even man’s insanity cannot rob the tortured and battered earth of its beauty. In many of his drawings he has been struck by the strange, unaccountable beauty of the meaningless shapes of things so tortured and battered. You feel that it has been seen with frightened eyes, eyes frightened at the inhumanity of it. It is waste – the waste of worlds, of ages, which look as if it had been made by some indifferent will of Nature. And then we remember that it has been made by man in his babyish will to power. That is the effect these drawings have on us. They, like all good drawings of the war, might be used in the propaganda for a league of peace.” Whilst at the Front, Nash worked feverishly, putting himself in extreme danger according to the memoirs of his wife Margaret. His determination to sketch, draw or paint within close proximity to the actual action of war resulted in mud splattering some of his works on paper. These works, created in the heat of battle, imbued with the terrified vitality of fear, anger and anguish were furiously captured in chalks, and frequently later worked up with pen, pencil and watercolour. He wrote to his wife: “I found the only way to work here was in rapid sketches and I have used nothing but brown paper and chalks”. 'A Farm, Wytschaete', 1917, was included in Nash’s hugely successful exhibition, ‘Void of War’, held in London in May 1918. As the novelist Arnold Bennett wrote in his introduction to the accompanying catalogue, Nash’s war paintings ‘seem to me to have been done in a kind of rational and dignified rage, in a restrained passion of resentment at the spectacle of what men suffer, in a fierce determination to transmit to the beholder the full true horror of war … Their supreme achievement is that in their somber and dreadful savagery they are beautiful. They give pleasure. We want to carry them away and possess them.’ John Rothenstein, the Tate Director, later wrote that the best of Nash’s war work ‘will take their place among the finest imaginative works of our time’. The first spring that Nash spent in the trenches in 1917 was mild and action seemed far away. Nash found it difficult to reconcile the new beginnings all around with the brutality of trench warfare. In a letter to his wife on 7 March 1917, Nash describes a wood on the way to the frontline trenches: '...in a wood passed through on our way up, a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas - a most desolate ruinous place two months back, today it was a vivid green; the most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere in the midst, from the depth of the wood's bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous, mad incongruity!' In 'A Farm, Wytschaete' we see a 'pitted and pocked' landscape in glorious colours, the scars of war made beautiful and fecund.