Interior was painted during a period of creative renewal in Paul Nash’s career, in which he sought to deepen his subject matter and create a more rigorous mode of representation. Where his previous work mostly used a naturalistic idiom, in 1928–29 he began to explore opaque symbolism and non-naturalistic pictorial devices.
Describing this period in the notes for his unfinished autobiography, Nash wrote:
A new vision and a new style. The change begins.
Rather than seek out new and unfamiliar kinds of object as the vehicle for his ‘new vision’, Nash employed familiar—even commonplace—objects and set about evoking them as characterful beings in their own right. The protagonists depicted in Interior are a tall pink jug, filled with summer flowers that curl through the air with peculiar animation; two books beside the jug, propped up and standing without support; and a black T–square on the floor, which leans against the wall as if resting. A dining chair at the lower left-hand corner is partially covered with a white sheet, which provokes an uncanny allusion to a partially dressed body. Nash was actively developing roles for these protagonists in 1928–30, and they appear in a group of related paintings made in these years. The ineffable strangeness of these pictures means that they bear only a loose connection to established genres, existing putatively within the bounds of still life and interior scenes even as they suggest more loaded thematic content.
