The No. 1A pocket Kodak Series II camera that Paul received as a gift from his wife in 1930 was quite a large device, almost medium format in size. It would fit in only the largest of pockets. Margaret records that, due to his increasingly poor health, by 1933 Paul was increasingly relying on it for his work, ‘as he now often felt unable to stand and make his notes and rapid sketches which had always been his custom when he visited new scenery. He describes this as his new eye…’. In an essay on ‘Photography and the Modern Art’ published in The Listener in 1932, Nash would write of the ‘peculiar power of the camera to discover formal beauty which ordinarily is hidden from the human eye.’ The camera would prove an increasingly significant influence upon his work through the 1930s, and he would prove himself to be an accomplished photographer. As Simon Grant recently observed in his selection of the artist’s photographs, Informal Beauty (2016), Nash produced a remarkable and insightful body of photography that is far more varied and extraordinary – and which was more in tune with developments in international photography – than has previously been acknowledged. His confident vision and his rigorous, ordering eye extended far beyond his passionate connection to the English landscape. And the ideas behind his photographs seeped across everything he did. They became inextricably intertwined with his painting, and overlapped with his forays into abstraction and surrealism. Private World was assembled by Nash’s friend, the artist and equally accomplished photographer John Piper, who made his selection of photographs from the many hundreds that Nash took between 1930 and 1946. (All of Nash’s photographs are now in the Tate Gallery Archive, along with his original camera.) Piper’s choice of twenty-five photographs, which reflect the wide range of Nash’s subjects, were printed from the original negatives by David Lambert for Fischer Fine Art and published in a numbered edition of 45. Piper wrote in his accompanying introduction to the collection: As in everything, [Nash] was as professional as he needed to be. If he wanted to take something and the sun was not out, he would wait for it; if he wanted a shadow at a certain angle, he would wait for it. He would stalk the Uffington White Horse or Maiden Castle or the stones at Avebury until the place and the light were right and his friends who drove him would have to wait and stalk too. It was often anxious for them and difficult for him since he was seldom well and that kind of effort and concentration was exhausting. Paul had an economical and obsessive eye and his new toy at once became a valuable weapon. As we note the important influence of poetry in Nash’s work before the Great War, and of theatre design in the years after it, so from the early 1930s onwards we must retain the awareness both of Nash’s increasing frailness, and the concomitant reliance on and inspiration of the camera in his late work. He was an artist who never ceased to look and discover, either with his own eye, or the eye of his camera.