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Lot Essay
Nash wrote of the present work in his book Picture History, which was never published, 'Now I was looking round for a new form and character of object-personage. This came to me eventually in a round-about way through studying a book on paleontology. Looking at the engraved plates of fossil impressions, it seemed to me these delicate, evocative forms could be revitalised in a particular way. I made a series of drawings of ghost personages, which showed them in the environment they naturally occupied in pre-history. The Ghost in the Shale in the Black Cliff of Kimmeridge clay. The turtle on the Dorset Shore, the gigantic ghost of Megacerous Hibernicus (Irish Elk) in the Moonlight forest' (see A. Bertram, Paul Nash, The Portrait of an Artist, London, 1955, p. 285).
In his 1955 monograph on the artist, Anthony Bertram notes that 'He [Nash] was pursuing the absent back to the dim beginnings of animal life, to long before man left his megaliths and earthworks as "footprints" but used the very form of the absent, the petrified being itself. He could come closer to it, because it had been so long dead' (ibid., p. 286).
In his 1955 monograph on the artist, Anthony Bertram notes that 'He [Nash] was pursuing the absent back to the dim beginnings of animal life, to long before man left his megaliths and earthworks as "footprints" but used the very form of the absent, the petrified being itself. He could come closer to it, because it had been so long dead' (ibid., p. 286).