Swanage is a small coastal town and civil parish in the south-east of Dorset at the eastern end of the Isle of Purbeck, an island only in name. The town is six miles south of Poole and twenty-five miles east of Dorchester, the County town of Dorset renowned for being the fictional town of Hardy’s ‘Casterbridge’. Swanage is half its size, a snug seaside resort. Originally a small port and fishing village, known in the medieval period as Swanawic and later Swanwich, it thrived in the Victorian era when it became a significant quarrying port and later a holiday destination attracting first the rich of the day from distant urban centres, who built robust seaside villas, and then thousands of visitors and day trippers drawn in the summer season by the bay’s sandy beaches and pleasant coastal walking. Surrounded by the sea on three sides, it is enveloped by the generous waters of Swanage Bay which curves from Peveril Point on its southern tip, to the cliffs of Ballard Head and the striking white stacks and pinnacles of Old Harry Rocks in the north. Twenty miles to the east, just behind the headland of Ballard Down, can be glimpsed the gleaming chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight, far beyond the seemingly infinite beaches of Bournemouth and Poole.

Isolated at the end of a long winding road and a single track rail-line that reaches from Wareham and Corfe Castle, Swanage is surrounded by an area of particular natural beauty, with an indented and spectacular coastline of angular limestone cliffs, crescent-moon shaped bays, and a string of thatched-roofed villages, stone-towered churches and chapels, an occasional ornate Victorian castle, and the less occasional architectural folly located high on promontories and ridges with fine views across to the distant Isle of Portland or across vast tracts of ancient heathland, much of it now commandeered by the military for live firing or tank manoeuvres.

During the years in the mid-1930s that Paul and Margaret Nash lived and worked in and around Swanage, the town was still gathered to the south of the Bay, sheltered behind the breakwater and dominated by the seafront with its gondolier pier, modest, but well-maintained public gardens, bandstands and public shelters. Rows of sturdy terrace buildings, built of brick but with local stone detailing, were built in a succession of schemes by local firms. The Nash’s lived in one such project at The Parade, a terrace of fine houses facing the sea, and constructed by entrepreneurs who had made their fortune as building contractors in London. This trade was dominated by John Mowlem, whose construction firm still thrives under his name today. His company shipped vast quantities of Purbeck stone to London, and to ballast his barges on their return to Dorset he collected fragments of the capital’s unwanted urban detritus, fittings and street furniture with which he embellished Swanage. Upon his death in 1868, Mowlem’s nephew Joseph Burt (heralded by Thomas Hardy as none other than the ‘King of Swanage’) having first installed across the town such utilities as piped gas and mains water, designed and built a trail of extraordinary, often eccentric, monuments and architectural capriccios that mark out Swanage as rather unique in the British Isles.

Unwanted seventeenth century statues were uprooted from London and transplanted around the town, a clock tower dedicated to the Duke of Wellington, which had once graced the southern approach to London Bridge was imported, as was an entire portion of the façade of the Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside lifted en bloc and re-erected as the new frontage of Swanage Town Hall. With its carved stone drapery, garlands and a pair of cherubs, its Baroque intrusion would seem truly incongruous were it not for the litter of other detritus Burt peppered throughout the town. On the High Street, he radically redesigned an adequate Georgian period Purbeck House, transforming it with the leftovers of his London demolitions into a rather incongruous Scottish Baronial style pile. Pevsner dubbed it ‘High Victorian at its most rebarbative’, noting the curious collage of columns from Waterloo Bridge, an arch from Hyde Park Corner, balustrades from Billingsgate, and statues from the Royal Exchange. This potpourri of salvage is complimented cross-culturally by a cast from the Parthenon Frieze.

Paul Nash was fascinated by the town’s architectural peccadillos and the eccentric collation of whimsical, well-meaning structures, but the most impressive piece of public sculpture, the Great Globe, he thought the ‘largest’ of Burt’s practical jokes. The town significantly stimulated his imagination, triggering his fascination with the work of ‘those eminent mid-Victorian surrealists’. The globe is an awesome sight: a representation of the Earth 10 feet across, weighing 40 tons, an unspinning mass carved in Purbeck stone. For Nash it compounded his initial response to Swanage: offering a unique assemblage of beauty, ugliness and the power to disquiet’, a very English brand of ‘natural surrealism’.1

Nash works relating to Swanage, 1933-1946

Ballard Head, Swanage 1935 Pencil, chalk and watercolour H 24.8 x W34.6 cm Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.822, p.430, illus.526 Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.11.

Ballard Landscape

1935 Chalk and watercolour H 17.4 x W 25.1 cm Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford, 1956. Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.823, p.430. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.12.

No 2, The Parade 1935 Watercolour H 28.0 x W 38.1 cm The title is the address in Swanage where Paul and Margaret Nash lived from February 1935 through that summer. Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.845, p.432, Pl.530. Margot Eates, The Master of the Image 1889-1946 (London: John Murray, 1973) p.61. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.30.

Peveril 1935 Pencil and watercolour H 19.7 x W 28.5 cm

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.847, p.432-3. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.32.

Pier

1935 Chalk and watercolour H 25.4 x W 35.6 cm Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.849, p.433. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.33.

Sea Wall

1935 Pencil, chalk and watercolour on cream paper H 38.1 x W 55.9 cm Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.855, p.433. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.39. Margot Eates, The Master of the Image 1889-1946 (London: John Murray, 1973) p.63, 64, pl.85.

Storm Sea, Swanage 1935 Pencil and watercolour on paper H 28.0 x W 38.1 cm Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.862, p.434. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.42. Piano Nobile, Paul Nash, Watercolours 1919-1946, Another Life, Another World, 10 September – 22 November 2014

Swanage 1935 Pencil and watercolour H 29.2 x W 39.4 cm Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.863, p.434. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.43.

Swanage, Low Tide 1935 Pencil and watercolour H 38.1 x W 55.9 cm Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat.no.864, p.434. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.44. Margot Eates (ed.), Paul Nash: Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations (London, 1948) p.52.

Swanage 1936 Photographic montage H 40.0 × 58.1 cm Tate T01771 Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.1340. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.56.

Tate Gallery Report 1972–1974, (London, 1975). https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-swanage-t01771 Paul Nash, ‘The Object’, Architectural Review, November 1936. Paul Nash,‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’, Country Life, May 1937, pp.496–7. Paul Nash, ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’ (Architectural Review, April 1936, pp. 151–4.

Swanage Sea Piece 1936 Photographic montage Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford, 1980) cat. no.1341. Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.57.