Object of the Month - John Nash's Winter in a Beechwood
1st December 2023
John Nash, Winter in a Beechwood
“A good example of a certain period”, is how Nash himself described this painting in a letter dated 2nd January 1967 – a letter in which he requested to borrow the painting for a retrospective exhibition being held at the Royal Academy later that year. The owner was happy to oblige.
For many years after the end of the First World War, Nash lived in Buckinghamshire and regularly visited the Chilterns. The beech woods at Whiteleaf (depicted here) became a favourite subject and Nash became known for his portrayals of the area. So much so that the artist, Robert Polhill Bevan, once wrote to his son to say, “I see the Chilterns quite differently since John Nash started painting them.” Bevan’s son tried to purchase this particular painting during the time it was displayed at the Royal Academy, offering the owner £200 (the equivalent of £3,000 today); she, seemingly wisely, refused.
Nash started life as a journalist but was encouraged to follow in the footsteps of his artist brother, Paul, with whom he exhibited at the Dorien Leigh Galleries in 1913. Paul, who had trained at the Slade School of Art, urged his brother to remain self-taught and keep the expressive freedom that exemplified his landscapes. John Nash began painting in oils during 1914 and it seems likely that his journalistic eye contributed to him being named as an official war artist in 1918. The scenes he witnessed during his brief military service, and his time as a war artist, lent a new hardness to some of Nash’s landscapes – perhaps witnessed here in the bare trees and the distinct path slicing through the centre of the painting.
Nash’s painting style is instantly recognisable, with its clear delineations delivering echoes of his brother’s more abstract technique but avoiding the starkness apparent in the work of other artists of the same period. The landscape paintings, for which he is best known, often evoke the seismic changes wrought on the English countryside by rapid developments in farming and agriculture, and many of the scenes he painted look very different today. Happily, Whiteleaf Woods are protected by the Woodland Trust and the views that Nash so loved are still in existence.
The painting sold on 13th December for £75,600, including premium.
