John Northcote Nash was born in London on 11 April 1893. He was the younger brother of the artist Paul Nash and was educated at Wellington College. He first worked as a journalist for a local paper but was encouraged by his brother Paul to turn his hand to watercolour landscapes and comic drawings. A joint exhibition with Paul at the Dorien Leigh Gallery, London, in 1913 was successful, and John was invited to become a founder-member of the London Group in 1914 and to join Robert Bevan’s Cumberland Market Group in 1915. In 1914 Nash began painting in oils with the encouragement of Harold Gilman, whose meticulous craftsmanship much influenced his artistic development. In 1916 Nash enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. He was appointed an official war artist in 1918. His most famous painting is Over the Top, which hangs in the Imperial War Museum, London. It is a celebrated image of the attack during which a company of 1st Battalion Artists’ Rifles left their trenches and headed for Marcoing, near Cambrai in the face of a German bombardment. Of 80 men, 68 were killed or wounded during the first few minutes. Nash was one of the twelve spared by the shellfire and he painted the picture three months later. Another of his paintings, also in the collection of the IWM is Oppy Wood (1917). Unlike his brother Paul, John favoured a painstaking naturalist style with geometrical schematisations. The Cornfield (1918; London, Tate) was the first painting John completed that did not depict war. 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. John said that he and Paul used to paint for their own pleasure only after six o’clock, when their work as war artists was over for the day. Hence the long shadows cast by the evening sun across the middle of the painting. After the war, Nash settled at Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire and was employed as the first art critic on the London Mercury in 1919. He had his first one-man show at the Goupil Gallery in 1921. In 1923 he became a member of the Modern English Water-Colour Society. In the post-war period, his efforts mainly went into painting landscapes, but like so many of his contemporaries, he remained much troubled by his war-time experiences and his feelings bled into his work. That is particularly evident in The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble (1922). In his brooding landscape, the trees and their tendril-like branches envelop the entire picture plane. His use of dark subtle colours and evening light give the painting a claustrophobic atmosphere. This painting, completed a few years 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. Although he had a great love of nature, he often used natural subjects to convey powerful and sensitive thoughts concerning the human condition. In 1924 he moved to Princes Risborough and taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. From 1934 he taught at the Royal College of Art in London, also producing wood engravings and lithographs. Nash had a great love for nature, and he concentrated on painting natural subjects throughout his career. Although primarily a landscape painter, Nash visited Bath in the 1920s and painted several views of the city. His delightful Canal Bridge, Sydney Gardens, Bath (1927) may be seen in Victoria Art Gallery, Bath. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Observer Corps, moving to the Admiralty as an official war artist, with the rank of captain in the Royal Marines in 1940. He was promoted acting-major in 1943 and relinquished his commission in November 1944. He then went to live in Essex at Wormingford, near Colchester. He was elected ARA in 1940 and RA in 1951. In the period 1945-57 Nash taught again at the RCA. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1954. Nash should noted for his observation: ‘The artist’s main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe, and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye.’ He was also an accomplished printmaker and was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers (1920). He produced woodcuts and wood engravings first as decorations to literary periodicals, and then increasingly, as illustrations for books produced by private presses. John Nash died on 23 September 1977 at Wormingford.