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 and Edward Wadsworth. He served in the Artists' Rifles during World War I until he was invalided home following a fall, and returned tothe 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.

THe Nashes eventually settled at Swanage, in Dorset, a small seaside resort that had had its heyday in the Victorian era. The town became the subject of a short essay, 'Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism', published in 'The Architectural Review' in April 1936. Following his move, in February 1935 Nash was invited to produce a motor-tourist's guide to Dorset, in a series sponsored by Shell and edited by the poet John Betjeman. A friend drove the Nashes around in her car and, as Margaret recorded: "This enabled Paul to make wonderful and extensive studies of Dorset, and he collected a large number of photographs with his beloved Kodak No. 2, and also produced an astonishing number of drawings and watercolours. Gradually he recovered his vitality and work poured out in every kind of experiment, especially in the direction of Surrealism, which at this time had begun to stimulate his imagination."

The restrained and restricted palette that is so distinctive in Nash’s post-Great War watercolours, and so apparent in works such as Dorset Landscape is worth noting here. As a critic from The Manchester Guardian wrote of an exhibition of Nash's work at the Leicester Galleries in 1928:
"Mr. Nash, apart from his sense of colour, his conscious and successful reticence in the use of colour, and his command of line, possesses the rarest gift of the landscape painter. He sees what, for the want of a better word, may be called the elemental side of nature. This capacity for seeing landscape as it is, as a child or even as someone country-bred may visualise it – a landscape uncomplicated by associations of picturesqueness or of human sentiment – is rare enough in European art."

After noting that this view was more common in Chinese art, the critic went on to suggest that it was his ‘unemotional, unsurprised acceptance and understanding of the elemental aspect of trees and landscape that isolates Mr. Nash and gives to his work an interest that is as truthful as it is rare."

Nash exhibited recent work in a show of contemporary watercolours at the Redfern Gallery, London, in early 1934. ‘In these water-colour drawings,’ The Observer’s critic wrote, ‘one can feel distinctly the contest of his three personalities: Paul the poet, Paul the faunesque [sic] woodlander, and Paul the disciple of Cézanne … for a while there has seemed a danger that the
last named might eventually overlay the second completely, but the Faun is being saved, I think, by the Poet.’ 'Dorset Landscape' was included in Nash’s exhibition of watercolours and drawings at the Redfern Gallery in April 1935.