John Nash (artist)

John Northcote Nash CBE, RA (11 April 1893 – 23 September 1977) was a British painter of landscapes and still-lifes, and a wood engraver and illustrator, particularly of botanic works.

Nash's health initially prevented him enlisting at the outbreak of the First World War but from November 1916 to January 1918 he served in the Artists Rifles, the unit that his brother had joined in 1914 before taking a commission in the Hampshire Regiment.

In 1914 Nash began painting in oils with the encouragement of Harold Gilman, whose meticulous craftsmanship influenced his finest landscapes.

Nash's most famous painting is Over the Top (oil on canvas, 79.4 x 107.3 cm), now hanging in the Imperial War Museum.

It is an image of the counter-attack at Welsh Ridge on 30 December 1917, during which the 1st Battalion Artists' Rifles left their trenches and pushed towards Marcoing near Cambrai.

The picture with its ordered view of the landscape and geometric treatment of the corn stooks prefigures his brother Paul's Equivalents for the Megaliths.

He frequently visited the valley of the River Stour in Essex and Suffolk, where he bought a summer cottage.

Eric Newton, the art historian said of him 'If I wanted a foreigner to understand the mood of a typical English landscape, I would show him Nash's best watercolours.

In this brooding landscape the trees and their tendril-like branches envelope the entire picture plane.The dark subtle colours and evening light give the painting a claustrophobic atmosphere.

[5] He was close friends with the writer Ronald Blythe, who dedicated his best-selling book Akenfield to the artist, and who shared his love of the unmanaged forest where fallen trees were left to create their own chaos.

After the war, Nash lived at Wormingford, in the Stour Valley in Essex, where he had bought the Elizabethan yeoman's house, Bottengoms in 1944.

Nash joined the staff of the Royal College of Art in 1945 and continued to teach there and later at the Flatford Mill field studies centre.

[9] Nash bequeathed his personal library and several of his paintings and engravings to The Minories, Colchester, who later sold most of the material to the Tate.