One of the originators of modern British art, Paul Nash took inspiration from nature, architecture and the esoteric writings of a seventeenth-century physician.
InSight No. 195
Paul Nash, Fantasy, 1932
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) lived through one of the most disturbing periods in English history during which civil war was followed by regicide, the restoration of the monarchy, and retribution. Notwithstanding his comparatively withdrawn existence as a physician settled in Norwich from 1637 until his death, and despite holding no public office either at court or in parliament, he achieved widespread recognition for his writings. His tracts cover a wide range of subjects, and among other neologisms it was he who coined the word ‘electricity’. The title of one of his best-known treatises provides an accurate sense of the discursive, philosophical tenor of his work: The Garden of Cyrus or The Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered. It was this book — along with another book by Browne called Urne Buriall — that came to be illustrated by Paul Nash (1889–1946) in 1931/32.
Nash admired Thomas Browne’s writing and when Cassell & Co. approached him with a commission to illustrate a text, he chose Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus. He produced thirty drawings for the book, some full page, others inserted between text, which were printed by Curwen Press as collotypes. The art historian Andrew Causey established that the designs for Urne Buriall were made sometime between April and November 1931, while those for The Garden of Cyrus were made in 1932 and finished by May of that year. Nash also devised the binding, which (as Anthony Bertram described it) was of ‘warm brown Morocco’ into which ‘a quincunx is tooled in gold and inlaid with vellum.’ So deluxe was this publication that the Curwen printer Simon Oliver wrote to Nash that it would ‘enter the small category of magnificent and monumental books’. Although it was limited to an edition of 215 copies, economic depression resulted in poor sales and Causey records that only 85 were bound.
Nash’s pictures for Browne’s esoteric texts are central to the canon of British surrealism. They marked a shift in his work away from the formalisation of naturalistic motifs and towards entirely constructed scenarios, distinctive for their intertwined elements of landscape, geometry and elusive happenings. His wife Margaret Nash thought them some of his ‘most important and imaginative designs’, and in 1952 the critic Herbert Read described Cassell’s book as ‘one of the loveliest achievements of contemporary English art’. The significance of the designs is also suggested by Nash’s decision, once the book was complete, to make six larger watercolours and three oil paintings from the designs for Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus. Fantasy is one of these, while another — Mansions of the Dead — was owned by the poet and impresario Edward James (1907–1984) and later purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1981.
The pictures that Nash made to accompany Browne’s text have never been considered illustrational. (The title page announced Browne’s treatises ‘with thirty drawings by Paul Nash’.) Nash’s designs rather parallel the labyrinthine text and only occasionally take Browne’s imagery and render it half literally in ethereal circumstances. Much of The Garden of Cyrus concerns the quincunx — the four points of a square with a fifth point at its centre. The collotype of Fantasy is inserted after a passage about optics and vision, in which Browne observes the behaviour of ‘reflected rayes of sight’: ‘For making the angle of incidence equal to that of reflexion, the visual raye returneth Quincuncially’ (‘quincuncially’ meaning in a criss-cross pattern). He notes that such a phenomenon is ‘observable in the Sun and Moon beheld in water.’ And it is one of these celestial bodies that floats low in the sky of Fantasy and emits a solid, singular beam of light, which strikes the ground immediately beside an uprooted tree. The behaviour of light is contrasted by a barrel-vaulted space held aloft by Corinthian columns on the left-hand side of the composition, which evokes Browne’s description of ‘whispering places […] framed by Ellipticall arches’. The result is a meeting between nature and architecture.
In the Outline for his unfinished autobiography, Nash wrote: ‘Making the designs for Urne Burial. Research and contemplation. The series slowly unfolds.’ It marked an awakening of new themes and new subjects, and in her memoir his wife Margaret remembered that ‘the whole book was a joy to him while he worked on it and helped to liberate his imagination’. More than this, it encouraged ‘the highly poetic vision which permeated his early work and a great deal of his subsequent paintings.’ These last include View Ƨ, which was inspired by a period of convalescence at the Hotel des Princes in Nice.
Their room in the hotel had ‘a small iron balcony that hung over the sparkling blue waters of the Baie des Anges; blue waters which never seemed to lose their colour, since the sun shone perpetually upon them’, Margaret described. As with Fantasy, such pictures began with the observable world but transgress it and remake real things as poignant objects, seemingly charged with impenetrable symbolism. Just as Thomas Browne described the phenomenon some four centuries earlier, View Ƨ shows sunlight breaking into a rich pattern of reflections in the waters of the Mediterranean. In a clear recollection of Browne’s concern with the quincunx, a related watercolour called Souvenir of Nice imagines a palm tree woven into the surface of the water by a criss-cross pattern of light and shade. In all such pictures by Nash, a profound and poetic study of both nature and old esoteric texts gave his art peculiar depths of visual meaning.
Images:
Attributed to Joan Carlile, Dorothy, Lady Browne and Sir Thomas Browne, c. 1641–50, oil on panel, National Portrait Gallery, London
Paul Nash, Mansions of the Dead, 1932, pencil and watercolour on paper, 57.8 x 39.4 cm, Tate
Paul Nash, View Ƨ, 1934, oil on board, 63.5 x 46 cm, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford
Paul Nash, Souvenir of Nice, 1934, pencil and watercolour on paper, 25.4 x 17.4 cm, Private Collection
Paul Nash, Fantasy (framed)
