PAULINE PROFILES
Paul Nash (1903-06) and Duncan Grant (1899-1902) David Roodyn (1967-1971) describes two of the most celebrated British painters of the twentieth century who attended St Paul’s over a seven-year period without being there contemporaneously.
Paul Nash
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aul Nash, the son of a barrister, came under the influence of another Pauline artist Eric Kennington (190004) whose work ‘The Kensingtons at Lavanie’ was featured in the OPC November eNewsletter. Nash fought on the Ypres Salient but was injured falling into a ditch. After St Paul’s he enrolled at the Slade under the legendary Henry Tonks whose pupils included Ben Nicholson, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Edward Wadhurst. The Royal Academy had been founded in 1768 with Joshua Reynolds its first President but the Slade was less formal and more innovative, for example they admitted women such as Bloomsberry Dora Carrington who enrolled aged seventeen. Duncan Grant was the son of an impoverished army officer but not a war artist. He is chiefly known as an integral member of the Bloomsbury Set many of whom he painted. He lived at Charleston near Lewes the Sussex outpost of Vanessa Bell and
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formed a fecund creative relationship with her. Their relationship went from the studio to the bedroom as after a short affair they had a daughter Angelica who married Grant’s lover Bunny Garnett. Grant was a highly successful artist in the inter-war years whose public commissions included Borough Polytechnic, Lincoln Cathedral and RMS Queen Mary but his reputation then waned. It was revived after dealer Daniel Wildenstein’s retrospective in the 1960s and he remains a collectible artist. Like many an artist it was war that was to define Paul Nash. However in the First World War any artist worked under severe restraints. They could not depict a dead British soldier. Christopher Nevinson had “censored” plastered over his work when he tried to do so. Nash manoeuvred his way
Landscape of a Dream, Paul Nash
round this by depicting felled trees. This was most effective (and depressing) in ‘The Menin Road’ with its stasis of pools of water, felled trees, pallid colours and a confused group of soldiers at the centre. He became an official war artist in 1917. After the war, Nash though always at heart a landscapist became more of a surrealist. He was fascinated by Freud’s theory of dreams best reflected in his ‘Landscape of a Dream’. He always suffered from asthma though he was a war artist in The Second World War too. His brother John who did not train at the Slade has recently become more and more fashionable. It is a reflection of the promotional operation of the art world that the more of his work that becomes available, the greater the number of publication of articles swelling his reputation.
