The landscape tradition in painting is made up of dozens of drawings and paintings which resonate with a sense that particular places have singular importance or significance – the genius loci or spirit of place. It is a characteristic of my own work which I will probably never understand completely, but the lives of other landscape artists can offer useful insights. The locus may be an area such as Constable’s Stour valley, or perhaps several places which have certain characteristics in common, as in the landscape work of Paul Nash.

The force of expression in Nash’s war paintings is a is a railing boat against the destruction of genius loci as he knew it and the paradox that such destruction creates a new, almost unbearable, spirit of place. This is evident both in the work made as a response to the aftermath of warfare at Ypres, Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge in the First World War and, later, in the Second World War, the consequences of aerial combat, as seen in The Battle of Germany and Totes Meer.

Recently at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester I saw two Paul Nash paintings which were new to me. One of them, a view of hills through an attic window, above, had a familiar look to it. The hills looked like the Malverns but from an angle I did not know. The displayed notes said that the painting had been made during a stay with friends called Neilson, at a house called Madams near Newent in Gloucestershire. I already knew of a couple of paintings by Nash of the Malvern Hills and that he had spent time painting in Gloucestershire. I decided that I would like to find Madams.

Shortly before the First World War a group of poets gathered in Dymock in rural Gloucestershire. The Dymock poets included Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Gibson, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Edward Thomas and Eleanor Farjeon. I knew that Nash had known Edward Thomas and that Edward Marsh had been a patron of both Nash and the Dymock poets. A poet friend suggested several people she had encountered in her own researches that I might contact. My first telephone call to a retired GP revealed that he knew all about Paul Nash and the present owners of the house, so I rang my friend and suggested that we might drive into rural Gloucestershire.

Paul Nash Skylight Landscape, 1941, oil on canvas, (66x96.5cm)

Courtesy of private collection on loan to the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester
at the time of printing the magazine in 1997

Inset: Photograph by David Prentice from inside the skylight at Madams, featured in Paul Nash's landscape

Paul Nash searched out places with high ground, often capped with woods and trees, and high, distant views across landscape panoramas. We found Madams at the top of a steeply climbing road where a wood capped the apex of a hill. A five-barred gate opened onto a drive that disappeared into the wood. We drove through the trees and after a short distance suddenly emerged quite close to the house.

The lady of the house and her husband, a retired farmer, had bought the house from Neilsons. We were generously welcomed and taken up into the attic “where Paul Nash had stayed”. There we saw the skylight from which the Whitworth Art Gallery painting Skylight Landscape had been made.

Andrew Causey in his catalogue essay for The Tate Gallery’s 1975 Paul Nash exhibition writes that during the Second World War “Nash no longer found what he wanted by exploring the individuality of places, the particulars of nature tend to be dissolved… the Severn valley never became a ‘place’ to Nash … “I agree that Nash’s concept of ‘place’ had certainly begun to change but from the beginning in 1938 he must have felt an affinity with this new but seemingly familiar location in Gloucestershire. He could look across to Cleeve Hill where later he made many paintings of the Malverns and the Severn valley from the Rising Sun Hotel; and across to the Malverns before the trees, which now obscure the view, grew tall. There is an elevated triangle of views across this broad valley floor and the Severn valley and its surrounding hills is a space eminently suitable for imagined flights.

Because of his asthma Nash had never managed to fly in an aeroplane, despite his almost complete concentration upon them in his second world war paintings. He equated his growing sense of mortality with the experience of flying. As he grew less mobile physically, he began to make use of binoculars to transport himself visually across the space between himself and his motif. The late paintings of the Malverns, and the ‘aerial flowers and ‘Witten Clumps’ paintings have colours and forms which have the softness of aerial perspective like those seen through a telescopic lens. Perhaps at Madams and at Cleeve Hill there was a metaphorical sense in which Nash was able to realise his passion for flight in the last few years of his life between 1938 and 1944. He died in 1946, aged 57.

David Prentice The Green Hill, oil on canvas, (150x150cm)

This article by David Prentice is taken from the June 1997 issue of The Artist

This advertisement for Winsor & Newton formed the back cover for this issue