John Nash

The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble

exhibited 1922

© The estate of John Nash. All Rights Reserved 2020 / Bridgeman Images

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Not on display

Artist: John Nash 1893–1977
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 762 × 508 mm
frame: 922 × 667 × 85 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1939
Reference: N05037

Display caption

In this brooding landscape the trees and their tendril-like branches threaten to invade the viewer's space. The dark colours and evening light give the painting a claustrophobic atmosphere. Like his brother Paul, John Nash had served with the Artists' Rifles for two years before becoming an Official War Artist in 1918. This painting, completed soon after the war, is characterised by a sense of bleak desolation that suggests the profound introspection that for many followed the devastation of the war.

Gallery label, August 2004

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Catalogue entry

N05037 THE MOAT, GRANGE FARM, KIMBLE c. 1922

Not inscribed.
Canvas, 30×20 (76×51).
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1939.
Coll: Purchased by the C.A.S. from the artist 1923.
Exh: London Group, May–June 1922 (12); Re-Opening Exhibition, Liverpool, October–December 1933 (109, repr. pl.24), as ‘Canal - Bath’; (?) Empire Art Loan Collections Society, Loan Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Engravings by Contemporary British Artists, New Zealand and Australia, 1934–5, and Tate Gallery, October 1935 (156), as ‘The Canal, Bath’.
Lit: John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore, 1956, p.243, repr. pl.22.
Repr: C.A.S. Report 1919–24, 1924, pl.3; Carlos Peacock, Painters and Writers, 1949, pl.89 (in colour).

On the back, over a rough preparation, there is a layout in pencil for an oblong landscape with a road curving between hills; also the inscription, ‘John Nash The Canal, Bath’, which has led to confusion with another painting, purchased by the C.A.S. at the Goupil Gallery Salon, October–November 1926 (108), and presented to Bradford in 1930–1 (repr. C.A.S. Report 1926, 1927, p.2).

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II