Richard Humphreys:

'This whole room is full of examples of artists' fascination with the great stone remains of the west of England - these strange places like Stonehenge and Avebury. And Paul Nash was a painter who was particularly fascinated: he wrote about these sites, he because absorbed in their meanings. And what he's done is to take some of the forms of the stones which you can see at Avebury, which of course is this huge site full of these massive stones, and turn them into very geometrical forms which don't actually look anything like the stones except perhaps some of the quality of a couple of those cylindrical forms...to take something from that and turn into something rather modern, very abstract and yet you can see in the background there's a landscape full of all the hills and the burial mounds that you would have found. So an intriguing example of an artist looking at the ancient landscape that had fascinated people for hundreds of years and then doing something distinctly modern with it. Finding the surreal in it. And if you look at the picture next to it that was discovered the year that Nash painted this in 1935, or rather rediscovered, it's a painting by a now completely forgotten artist called Thomas Guest who painted a commission for a Reverend Hutchins who had excavated some land in Wiltshire. And what he does is rather like Nash, is to foreground some of these big forms, in this case a big beaker pot that had been dug up, against the Wiltshire background. So it's a rather intriguing comparison. The reason we put the two images together. I don't think Nash knew about the Thomas Guest (very few people would have done) and yet it was interesting that it was rediscovered just at the moment that people like Nash were becoming interested again in this kind of landscape.'