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Lot Essay
Landscape from a Dream (1936) traces the origins of one of Paul Nash’s most celebrated Surrealist compositions, offering a rare window into the artist’s thinking at the height of his engagement with Surrealism in Britain. Painted in the months following the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, the oil version has been in the Tate’s collection since 1946. In Andrew Causey’s judgment, it was Nash’s most successful entirely new picture of this period, its brilliance of colour prefiguring the final phase of his oil painting in the 1940s. The oil itself was ready for exhibition as early as January 1937, only for influenza to force its withdrawal from a show of Contemporary British Art at Rosenberg & Helft. The present gouache, datable to 1936, is closely related to this composition, capturing Nash’s mind at work towards the resolved arrangement of the finished oil.
The composition itself is one of Nash’s most sustained meditations on the frame as threshold. A folding screen, its mirrored panels catching the ‘blue and beguiling’ sea at Swanage he would describe in his autobiography, opens on the right onto a rock-strewn shore; a mirror opposite reflects the sun and a bird in flight (Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, London, 1949, p. 41). At the centre, where mirror and screen overlap, a stone hawk watches its own reflection: caught, in Nash’s symbolism, between the temporal world of his own image and the spiritual world of a sphere beside him, lit by the same sun. Were the hawk to identify with that sphere rather than his own reflection, perhaps he would gain the freedom of the sky beyond. The present study already contains this arrangement in essence, differing from the finished oil only in the absence of a single cloud to the right of the sky: evidence, within the smallest of details, that what we see is Nash discovering his picture, not simply repeating it.
The medium seems suited to this moment of discovery. Watercolour and gouache carry a transparency that oil paint cannot match: layers remain visible through one another, revisions sit alongside first thoughts rather than burying them, and the sheet retains a lightness fitting a landscape explicitly framed as a dream. Where the oil resolves Nash’s ideas into a single, fixed surface, the present work lets us watch them settle; pencil beneath watercolour beneath crayon, each layer legible and in motion.
Nash gifted Landscape from a Dream to his wife Margaret, inscribing ‘for Margaret Theodosia’ in the lower left and noting that it was part of ‘Margaret’s collection’ on the reverse. The dedication carries a particularly poignant resonance in light of the painting's central motif. The hawk depicted in Landscape from a Dream was not an invention but a small Egyptian stone sculpture owned by Nash, which was later placed upon his grave at St Mary’s Church, Langley. Positioned before the headstone, the bird echoes its appearance in the painting, where it contemplates its own reflection between the material and spiritual worlds. That Nash chose this same object to mark his final resting place suggests the enduring significance of one of his most celebrated compositions. The connection is deepened still further by the inscription on the gravestone itself, ‘In memory of Margaret’, creating a touching parallel with the present work’s dedication and linking the artist, his wife and one of the defining images of British Surrealism.
The composition itself is one of Nash’s most sustained meditations on the frame as threshold. A folding screen, its mirrored panels catching the ‘blue and beguiling’ sea at Swanage he would describe in his autobiography, opens on the right onto a rock-strewn shore; a mirror opposite reflects the sun and a bird in flight (Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, London, 1949, p. 41). At the centre, where mirror and screen overlap, a stone hawk watches its own reflection: caught, in Nash’s symbolism, between the temporal world of his own image and the spiritual world of a sphere beside him, lit by the same sun. Were the hawk to identify with that sphere rather than his own reflection, perhaps he would gain the freedom of the sky beyond. The present study already contains this arrangement in essence, differing from the finished oil only in the absence of a single cloud to the right of the sky: evidence, within the smallest of details, that what we see is Nash discovering his picture, not simply repeating it.
The medium seems suited to this moment of discovery. Watercolour and gouache carry a transparency that oil paint cannot match: layers remain visible through one another, revisions sit alongside first thoughts rather than burying them, and the sheet retains a lightness fitting a landscape explicitly framed as a dream. Where the oil resolves Nash’s ideas into a single, fixed surface, the present work lets us watch them settle; pencil beneath watercolour beneath crayon, each layer legible and in motion.
Nash gifted Landscape from a Dream to his wife Margaret, inscribing ‘for Margaret Theodosia’ in the lower left and noting that it was part of ‘Margaret’s collection’ on the reverse. The dedication carries a particularly poignant resonance in light of the painting's central motif. The hawk depicted in Landscape from a Dream was not an invention but a small Egyptian stone sculpture owned by Nash, which was later placed upon his grave at St Mary’s Church, Langley. Positioned before the headstone, the bird echoes its appearance in the painting, where it contemplates its own reflection between the material and spiritual worlds. That Nash chose this same object to mark his final resting place suggests the enduring significance of one of his most celebrated compositions. The connection is deepened still further by the inscription on the gravestone itself, ‘In memory of Margaret’, creating a touching parallel with the present work’s dedication and linking the artist, his wife and one of the defining images of British Surrealism.