The End of the Steps

细节

Paul Nash (1889-1946)
The End of the Steps
signed and dated 'Paul Nash/1922' (centre right) and signed again 'Paul Nash' (on the canvas overlap)
oil on canvas
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm.)

来源

Desmond Coke.
His sale; Sotheby's, London, 23 July 1931, lot 152 (bought Tooth's).
Moir Carnegie.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 24 January 1951, where purchased by Leicester Galleries.
with Leicester Galleries, London, where purchased by N.L. Hamilton-Smith, Windlesham, Surrey, circa 1951, and by descent.

出版

F. Rutter, Some Contemporary Artists, London, 1922, p. 215.
A. Rutherston (ed.), Contemporary British Artists Paul Nash, London, 1923, pl. 29
A. Bertram, Paul Nash, London, 1923, p. 138.
A. Causey, Paul Nash, Oxford, 1980, p. 377, no. 335.

展览

London, New English Arts Club, May 1922, no. 33.
Oxford, Arts Club, Retrospective Exhibition of work by Paul Nash 1910-1931, October 1931, no. 21, as 'The Steps'.
London, Redfern Gallery, Watercolours, Drawings, Collages, and Objects by Paul Nash, April 1937, no. 38.

注意事项

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

拍品专文

Dating from 1922, The End of the Steps belongs to a series of pictures that Nash painted of the Dymchurch coast.

'Of the places where Nash worked in the ten years after the war only Dymchurch on the Kent coast, with its vast length of wall built to protect Romney Marsh from flooding by the sea, touched Nash's imagination to the degree Iver Heath and Wittenham had before the war. From the simple but remarkable appearance of the place Nash evolved a complex mythology related to ideas of vulnerability, attack, pursuit and defence, and having personal references to himself as well as to the external scene. Nash found copious material for his work at Dymchurch until 1925, when it suddenly lost its magic and the Nashes moved to Iden, an inland village in Sussex, and Nash announced decisively to Anthony Bertram: "I shall never work there any more", and reflected: "A place like that and its effect on me - one's effect on it. It's a curious record formally and psychologically when you see the whole set of designs together." This sense that Nash rejected Dymchurch, rather than simply left it to live somewhere else, is a symptom of the intensely personal and very demanding relationship he formed with places. When they were no longer relevant to his mood he moved on.

'The tenor of the Dymchurch pictures, the pattern of the waves breaking against the shore and the wall, the sense of the wall as a bastion or defence ... all seem to infer threat and insecurity. The drama was personal; Nash's early experience of the sea had been "cold and cruel"' (A. Causey, Exhibition catalogue, Paul Nash paintings and watercolours, London, Tate Gallery, 1975, pp. 17-18).

The large square, fortress-like, structure apparent in the present work also appears in two other works from this series, Dymchurch Steps, 1924-44 (National Gallery of Canada) and The Wall, 1924 (private collection) (see A. Bertram loc. cit.).