Paul Nash was born on 11 May 1889 at Kensington, London. He was the son of a successful lawyer and was the elder brother of John Nash. He grew up in a troubled household and was frequently ill as a child. His mother suffered from depression, spending long periods in mental institutions. As a teenager, Nash was attracted to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially to its notions of romantic death and in consequence, was preoccupied with his own mortality. He was educated at St Paul’s School and studied at the Chelsea Polytechnic 1906-07. He attended London County Council evening classes at Bolt Court, Fleet Street in the period 1908-10. He then enrolled at the Slade, where his contemporaries included Stanley Spencer, Christopher Nevinson, Mark Gertler and William Roberts. Nash later said it was: ‘seething under the influence of Post Impressionism … The students were by no means a docile crowd and the virus of the new art was working in them uncomfortably’. Nash had his first one-man exhibition of drawings and watercolours at the Carfax Gallery in 1912. He then worked under Roger Fry at the Omega Workshops and on restoring the Mantegna Cartoons at Hampton Court in 1914. Nash wrote to Gordon Bottomley on 27 September 1914: ‘I have joined the Artists’ London Regiment of Territorials, the old Corps which started with Rossetti, Leighton and Millais as members in 1860. Every man must do his bit in this horrible business so I have given up painting. There are many nice creatures in my company and I enjoy the burst of exercise – marching, drilling all day in the open air about the pleasant parts of Regents Park and Hampstead Heath.’ Nash’s Ypres Salient exhibited at the Goupil Gallery 1917 led to his appointment as an official war artist, but he was much exercised by the constraints he had to work under and told a friend: ‘I am not allowed to put dead men into my pictures, because apparently they don’t exist’. On another occasion, he said: ‘I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’ In the post war years, Nash lived at Dymchurch in Kent. Nash taught at Oxford 1920-23 and first visited Paris in 1922. He taught at the RCA in the period 1924-25. He illustrated several books, including Genesis (1924) and Urne Buriall (1932). In 1933 Nash fell seriously ill with asthma and almost died from an attack in 1936. He taught again at the RCA in the period 1938-40 and his pupils included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. He exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibitions in London 1936 and Paris in 1938. He settled in Oxford in 1939. Nash was a pioneer of Modernism, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933 he co-founded the influential modern art movement ‘Unit One’ in concert with his fellow artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and the influential art critic Herbert Read. It was a short-lived, but important move towards the revitalisation of British art in the inter-war period. Nash’s attempt to integrate his work into modern life was prompted by a desire to engage with audiences outside of the normal gallery context. Furthermore, he hoped, like his patrons Frank Pick and the publisher Harold Curwen, that art, beauty and modern life could be reconciled. His own work was of course tinged by the melancholy of his experiences in the Great War. During the Second World War, Nash was employed by the Ministry of Information and the Air Ministry The paintings he produced during that period include the Battle of Britain and Totes Meer (Dead Sea). Retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at Temple Newsam, Leeds in 1943 and at Cheltenham in 1945. Nash died on 11 July 1946 at Boscombe, Hampshire and was buried at Langley Church, Buckinghamshire. Memorial exhibitions were held at the Tate Gallery 1948 and in Canada 1949-50; an exhibition of his photographs was held by the Arts Council 1951 and a book of his photographs, Fertile Image, was published the same year. A fragment of autobiography, together with some letters and essays was published posthumously as Outline in 1949. His voluminous correspondence with Gordon Bottomley was published as Poet and Painter in 1955. A further exhibition of his work was held at the Redfern Gallery in 1961.