"...looking back over the great voyage to the (Purbeck) hills and the heaths and the sea, it seems all a dream but most fortunately a dream remembered - and so incredibly varied - I shall never quite get over it." Paul Nash, 1943
Paul Nash in Dorset
Dorset exercised a powerful hold on Paul Nash, fuelling his imagination and enriching his paintings, photographs, and writing. He thought of Dorset, and the Island of Purbeck in particular, as an ancient and mythical landscape ‘overcast by a noble melancholy’, a place strewn with memorable motifs and deeply enriched by ‘the burden of its extraordinary inheritance.’
From the mid-1930s until his death in 1946, Nash created over 80 artworks depicting the sites and features of the county. They range from ancient places such as Maiden Castle and Badbury Rings to the limestone promontories and fossilised forests on the Purbeck coast. Swanage town, in particular, fascinated Nash. Its blend of architectural quirkiness and surrealist potency released a new dimension in his creativity, leading to new art works that defined him as a painter of international significance.
A Gallery and Catalogue
Nash’s Dorset artworks are distributed all over the world. They have rarely been seen or considered together, and the impact on his art and his reputation has not been fully told. This project, ‘Paul Nash in Dorset’ aims to redress this imbalance by creating a virtual gallery and catalogue of the 83 works known to have originated from the County between 1934-1946. Where possible, each will be reproduced alongside short texts about the work, relating them to Nash’s development as a painter and to his writings and reflections about his ‘kingdom’ of Purbeck. In so doing, the project attempts to re-appraise the connections between the artist and the many fascinating geographies and mythical histories of Dorset.
