Mine Crater. Hill 60. December 1917

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: HM Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road

Revealing the impact of war on the landscape, this dramatic scene was created by Paul Nash while undertaking active service in the First World War. Nash joined the Artists’ Rifles in September 1914 and, in 1917, was appointed an Official War Artist to record action in Flanders. That autumn he visited Ypres Salient, the area around the Belgian city of Ypres on the Western Front, the site of some of the largest confrontations. Here Nash witnessed the aftermath of German shelling, particularly on the infamous Hill 60, an area that had been extensively mined by Britain since 1915. Seeing the brutalised landscape, Nash described it as ‘... pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds’. His resulting lithographs, made with the help of fellow war artist C.R.W. Nevinson, were first shown at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1918. At the time, writer Arnold Bennett commented: Lieutenant Nash has seen the Front simply and largely. The convention he uses is ruthlessly selective; the wave-live formation of shell-holes, the curves of shell-bursts, the straight lines and sharply-defined angles of wooden causeways, decapitated trees, the fangs of obdurate masonry, the weight of heavy skies.

Born in Kensington, London, Paul Nash studied at the Slade School of Art (1910–11). He served with the Artists’ Rifles during the First World War and in 1917 he was appointed an Official War Artist, acclaimed for his paintings of shattered landscapes in France and Flanders. In the 1920s Nash moved to Rye, Sussex, painting bleak and ominous landscapes of the area. He began travelling abroad, visiting France regularly. In 1931 he visited New York, Washington and Pittsburgh. He founded the Unit One group in 1933 and participated in the ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ (London, 1936). In the Second World War Nash became an Official War artist to the Air Ministry and Ministry of Information. He died in Hampshire in 1946.

Places

France, Belgium

Subjects

topography, WW1 art, landscape C20th, tree, crater, World War I

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), lithograph

Artist

Paul Nash (1889 - 1946)

Title

Mine Crater. Hill 60. December 1917

Date

December 1917

Medium

Lithograph

Dimensions

height: 38.50 cm, width: 47.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Editions Minotaure SA, January 1995

Inscription

below image: Mine Crater. Hill 60. / Paul Nash Dec. 1917

GAC number

16872