By late 1935, after a period of infatuation with Swanage, Nash’s mood suddenly changed. In late autumn he wrote to his friend Ruth Clark that he now found the town ‘unbearably vulgar. The people who live there, my God, the people who come there on buses and steamers – beyond relief.’ (n.d. but probably, November 1935)

These were strong emotions for a personality normally even-tempered and measured. But the outburst reflected a matrix of personal and professional challenges in his life, not least the realisation that his authority in the British art scene was slipping away with the demise of Unit One. He recognised too that his poor health was a serious and chronic condition, which would always blight him, and he had to admit that the site that he and Margaret had selected for their house on the edge of Durlston was too exposed for his vulnerable health.

In January 1936 the Nashs quit Swanage laden with a cargo of shells, stones and Dorset detritus to take up residence in Hampstead, London, considered better for Paul after a sodden winter in Swanage. Their new home was also closer to fellow artists and friends, amongst them Ben Nicholson, Herbert Read, and Barbara Hepworth. That year saw the publication of The Dorset Shell Guide by the Architectural Press, London. (This was the seventh Shell Guide edited by John Betjeman)

Creating the guide had taken Nash much of the previous year. It had involved more travelling, historical research and writing than drawing or painting. Ever since his re-engagement with Dorset he had been forming an idea about an autobiography initially to be called Genius Loci, but later changed to Outline. The Shell Guide gave an opportunity to nurture his prose, producing some of his most imaginative writing to date. Here are the opening paragraphs of the introductory essay, The Face of Dorset:

When we speak of the face of the earth, the face of the waters, quoting that ancient imaginative expressions, we probably refer to an extent or expanse of space rather than a suggestion of a featured mask. But in describing some comparatively small localised area of land and sea, it is perhaps possible to think of it more in a literal sense as, in fact, something like a countenance. At least, I have sought to conceive such an actual symbol in the description of the county of Dorset. As I see it, there appears a gigantic face composed of massive and unusual features; at once harsh and tender, alarming yet kind, seemingly susceptible to moods, but, in secret, overcast by a noble melancholy – or, simply, the burden of its extraordinary inheritance. (Revised edition, 1966, p.9)

Nash had long drawn on this parallel between the human visage and landscape. His evocation of the ‘face in the night sky, the voice by the bridge…’ harked back to 1910 with refined Romantic renditions of ethereal female faces floating over bucolic scenery. His exposure to the Western Front during the Great War rid him of the rather sentimental fin-de-siecle visions of sirens and Circe, and drew him to darker, more malign manifestations of the concealed faces in nature: ‘In a black pine wood is a lake./An inscrutable, dark face/staring up…’. And of another wood engraving from 1922, he added: ‘Winter is life imprisoned. A face/peering through an iron mask…’. By the mid-1930s he found in Dorset a darker, more latent ancient environment where the face of nature was ubiquitous and unnerving. As Andrew Causey has observed, Nash drew inspiration from Thomas Hardy whose fictional creation of ‘Egdon Heath’ was itself drawn from the landscape around Wareham, and described in the opening pages of The Return of the Native (1878) as ‘A Face on which Time makes but Little Impression’.

Just as Hardy made the Heath more than a location, using it as a symbol of the tragic fate that pursues people, so Nash sought out images that illustrated the greater strength of nature over man’s creation and symbolising the frailty of even man’s best achievements.

Through his own taut prose, the Dorset Guide allowed Nash to surface his fascination with nature at its most oppositional and dichotomous:

The coast is an iron wall, seeming to be literally built of huge grey-black blocks. The seas are vicious here, and there is no more bitter war between land and water than is fought along Winspit Cliff and Dancing Ledge, where the waves can be seen leaping in eccentric frenzy.

Paul Nash, Dorset: Shell Guide, p. 8, 1936. Tate Archive Collection (TGA/964/1/16).

Conflicted, oppositional, fought, locked-in: such words were a reprise of the battered memoryscapes of the Western Front or the entropic energy of the tides at Dymchurch in his severe paintings and prints of the early 1920s. A decade later, he wrote of Dorset having ‘a dream image where things are so often incongruous and slightly frightening in their relation to time or place.’

Heavier on text than of images, the Shell Guide featured only four of Nash’s watercolours and 12 photographs. Its cover and endpapers feature photographic montages of coastal formations, striated stonework, fish fossils of an extinct ray-finned creature and other specimens located and lifted from the limestone beaches of the Purbecks. Inside, are photographic images of an adder’s patterned head, the rich markings of a pine hawk moth, the monstrous head of an ancient ichthyosaurus. In more expansive and panoramic mode, relying on his trusted Kodak, Nash captured the phantasmagoric natural, unnatural and frankly implausible natural formations of Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door, the folded and faulted limestone rocks at Stair Hole, and the infinite vista of Chesil Bank seen from Portland. In all it is a curious compendium of the marvellous and the mysterious. Not quite the gazetteer one might have expected, Nash created a publication that was genuinely different: a ‘vivid encounter with vast, uncanny time and matter whose scale dwarfs that of the human experience.’ (Anna Reid, "Paul Nash’s Geological Enigma", British Art Studies, Issue 10, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/areid)

One of Paul Nash’s first projects on his return to London in early 1936, was a commission for the British Timber Development Association, which followed from his successful work designing interiors, as well as textiles and rugs. Nash revelled in the design process bringing a disciplined mind to the geometric exercise of developing a substantial display on the theme of ‘Timber through the Ages’. The final design, a mural 20 ft long by 10 ft high, comprised seven contrasting rectilinear-shaped wood veneers, complemented by photographs explaining the structure of wood, its variety and usages. In February 1936, Nash wrote to Eileen Agar, ‘my fair collaborator’, who had helped him fabricate the model while together in Swanage, inviting her to see the final piece. Despite his enthusiastic invitation she was unable to join him at the opening of the exhibition at Charing Cross Underground station on 27 February.

Throughout the year, the Nashs returned to Purbeck. During Easter 1936, they stayed at ‘Sea Breeze’ (a small guesthouse, now called Seaview Cottages / Ocean View) on the edge of Worth Matravers. A sign bearing the name of the cottage is clearly visible in the background of one of his photographs of a found object, Mineral Kingdom, a hewn piece of black rock possibly taken from the ledges around Kimmeridge. As ever, Nash was stimulated by the coastal environs. He wrote energetically to Eileen Agar of the familiar views and walks: one letter accompanied by a small sketch of the strip lynchets on the fields seen from Worth:

“ It is rather exciting here when the sun shines through. The landscape is unique and exciting. We walk always on short turf speckled with speedwells and celandines – a bit like flowers of heaven.” (Paul Nash to Eileen Agar, not dated, but probably Easter 1936)

Back in London the year unfolded with fresh intensity. Paul’s affair with Eileen Agar, described as ‘passionate, fraught and short-lived’, brought her into the orbit of painters linked to Surrealism. Nash served on the committee of the International Surrealist Exhibition, and arranged for two organisers to visit her studio where they selected pieces for the show which opened amidst controversy at the New Burlington Galleries in June 1936. Nash showed four paintings, five collages, two ‘designed objects’, and a ‘found object interpreted’.

One of the collages that Nash exhibited was ‘Swanage’, a collage made from his own photographs of found objects. His period in the town coincided with his preoccupation with Surrealism and his fascination with objet trouve discovered on the beaches along the Purbecks, many subsequently photographed with his faithful Kodak. Fascinating in their own right, the objects contained multiple references to people, places and personal events, invariably centred on Swanage. The synchronicity was transformational for his practice as a painter.

Nash noted the Surrealist potential of Swanage within days of his first visit. He described the town as ‘just a Surrealist dream’ (Paul Nash to Lance Sieveking, November 1934) strewn with strange things taken from their original context (the lampposts, for example, imported from London’s Hanover Square context) and the incongruent sights (swans riding the waves in the bay) and objects that seemed to be displaced out of time: ancient fossils, extraordinary flora and fauna living and dead, mysterious geological structures and historical references drawn from widely different periods. (See Tate Gallery record, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-swanage-t01771)

He elaborated on these ideas in a short essay, ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’ written for The Architectural Review, published in April 1936. (Paul Nash, ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’, The Architectural Review LXXIX, April 1936, pp.161-4) Nash distinguishes between the work of those who belong to a Surrealist grouping, their work distinguished by a capital ‘S’, and artworks, situations, objects or locations that have a dreamlike character or incongruous settings that evoke disquiet or the uncanny. These, he describes, as surreal with a small ‘s’. Swanage seeped surrealism out of its pores. He described it to Sieveking in November 1934 as a dream image ‘where things are so often incongruous and slightly frightening in their relation to time or place.’ 

Date: 1936-38

Title of artwork:

Landscape from a Dream

Medium and dimensions: Oil on canvas, H 67.9 × 101.6 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980), cat. no.881.

Mary Beal, ‘Event on the Downs Reconsidered’, Burlington Magazine, Vol.131, November 1989, issue 1040.

Roger Cardinal, The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (London: Reaktion, 1989).

Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (London 1964), p.II.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.50.

David Boyd Haycock, Paul Nash (London: Tate, 2002).

Paul Nash, Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, with a preface by Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).

James Russell, Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream (The Mainstone Press, 2011).

Collection: Tate Gallery, No.5667

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 1946

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-landscape-from-a-dream-n05667

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Objects in a Field

Medium and dimensions: Chalk and watercolour (with photographic collage), H 55.9 × 31.8 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980),

cat. no.882, p.436.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.51.

https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Objects-in-a-Field/D7AE56151D8E0DA9

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Souvenir of Worth

Medium and dimensions: Pencil, chalk and watercolour, H 17.8 × 25.4 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980),

cat. no.884, p.436.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.52.

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Study, Worth Matravers

Medium and dimensions: Watercolour, H 38.1 × 55.9 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980),

cat. no.885, p.436.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.53.

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Worth Matravers

Medium and dimensions: Watercolour, H 38.1 × 55.9 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980),

cat. no.887, p.437.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.54.

Margot Eates, The Master of the Image 1889-1946 (London: John Murray, 1973) plate 84.

Photograph of strip lynchets near Winspit, Worth Matravers, Isle of Purbeck

Collection: Sir John Parkinson by c.1937; from whom purchased by the Leicester Galleries, London; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in January 1954.

https://artcollection.culture.gov.uk/artwork/2615/

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Worth Matravers

Medium and dimensions: Watercolour, H 38.1 × 54.6 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980),

cat. no.888, p.437.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.55.

Collection: Audrey Kennett, Somerville College, Oxford, 1977

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Swanage

Medium and dimensions: Photographic montage, H 40.0 × 58.1 cm

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 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.

Date: 1936

Title of artwork:

Swanage Sea Piece

Medium and dimensions: Photographic montage

References:

Andrew Causey, Paul Nash Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, 1980),

cat. no.1341.

Penny Denton, ‘Seaside Surrealism’ Paul Nash in Swanage (Durlstone, 2002) cat.no.57.