In the 1930s, Paul Nash and his wife Margaret made friends with Clare Neilson and her wealthy husband Charles. Paul was a regular visitor to their large house, Madams, in Gloucestershire. It was in June 1945, whilst he and Margaret were staying at the Rising Sun Hotel in the neighbouring village of Cleeve Hill, that Nash painted a number of watercolours based on the fine views to be seen from the hotel windows. Included among them was this work, Landscape Through the Window and Through the Looking Glass. Having positioned a mirror beside a window, Nash has captured a curious and at first disconcerting double view in which we seem to look into a landscape that somehow lies hidden within the landscape. The title is an allusion to Alice through the Looking Glass, and not surprisingly Lewis Carroll was considered a key literary figure among both French and British surrealists. Eileen Agar would call him ‘a mysterious master of time and imagination, the Herald of Sur-Realism [sic] and freedom, a prophet of the Future and an uprooter of the Past… All is well with Alice, she is untouchable and eternal with a mammalian Brain and a sense of the wonderful world we live in.’ In 1951, Margaret Nash wrote that through the first half of the 1940s, alongside Paul’s war work, ‘there poured out a number of his finest civilian pictures…’. As she explained, ‘It seemed to me that his failing bodily strength was no longer able to chain his spirit, and gradually the spirit rose out of the hampering material surroundings and became strong and free and happy. … It seemed to me as if we lived in two worlds, a restricted, drab, cruel world of war, and the lovely other world which was quite clearly on the other side of life, in which he and I were quite free in our minds and able to enjoy and perceive more clearly than ever before an esoteric beauty in life, in matter, and in people.’ In Landscape Through the Window and Through the Looking Glass, Nash seems to glimpse that ‘lovely other world’. This was among his final works. In June 1946 he and Margaret went to stay at a hotel at Boscombe, near Bournemouth, for the sea air. He was working on a watercolour of the view from the balcony of the Channel and the Isle of Wight in the distance As Margaret recorded in the conclusion of her memoir, ‘I have that last water colour, unfinished, but full of vitality and charm, and he lay down his brush that evening and wrote a letter to his brother, and then went to bed and fell asleep and never awoke.’ This text was written by David Boyd Haycock for Paul Nash: Another Life, Another World (2019, Piano Nobile Publications).