John Nash, Deer Fence, 502 x 438mm

John Nash was born in 1893 in London and from 1944 lived in Wormingford, Essex where he died in 1977. He received no formal training as a painter but was encouraged to take it up by his brother Paul. He began painting in oil but soon abandoned it for watercolour and wood engraving. He belonged,along with Edward Bawden, David Jones, Piper and Eric Ravilious, to the English School of romantic landscape painters. Of all these artists his paintings are most pure as watercolours, he never experimented with techniques unnatural to the medium and developed his own style based on the application of clean colour, to the paper. He had a love of wild flowers and old English garden plants and illustrated books and portfolios of them. His work is in national galleries.