Paul Nash Letters to Mercia Oakley

The painter, printmaker, and designer Paul Nash (1899-1946) was born in London and raised in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. He trained as an illustrator at Chelsea Polytechnic and the London County Council’s Bolt Court Art School, before enrolling at the Slade School. Nash initially found some success as a bookplate designer. His work from this early period heavily references the British Pre-Raphaelites. Nash sought to fashion himself as a “Painter-Poet,” in the tradition of such figures as Dante Rossetti and William Blake. Nash opened his first solo show in November 1912 at the Carfax Gallery in London, which appears to have been well received. It was through this exhibition that he would become acquainted with the critic and painter Roger Fry. Throughout his career, Nash’s work was characterized by dark overtones and often literary themes. The English landscape was a recurring theme in Nash’s work, often inflected with elements of the political atmosphere of the times. Beginning in the 1920s, Nash worked within something of a surrealist paradigm, which would become even more pronounced during his World War II era art.

At the outbreak of World War I, Nash enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles for home service. In March 1917, he was sent to the front. He was injured in a fall in May 1917, but returned to Ypres Salient as an official war artist in November 1917. His work from this period focused on the effect of war on the landscape. In May 1918, he staged the exhibition “Void of War” at the Leicester Galleries, which led to further painting commissions from the Ministry of Information. Nash also served as official war artist during the Second World War, when he was assigned by The War Artists’ Advisory Committee to the Air Ministry and then the Ministry of Information. In his World War II work, Nash engaged frequently with themes of military technology and destruction. Nash began writing his autobiography, Outline, in 1936 or 1937, but it remained unpublished until 1949 when Faber and Faber released it posthumously. Nash died of heart failure in 1946. In 1948, the Tate Gallery, London held a major memorial exhibition of his work.

The recipient of Nash’s letters, Mercia Oakley was a close friend and confident of the painter. They met as children through Oakley’s godmother, Mrs. George Grimsdale, a neighbor of the Nash family at Iver Heath. Oakley appears to have spent significant time at the Grimsdale’s home, Wings. George Grimsdale was one of Nash’s earliest patrons, commissioning a bookplate in 1916. The relationship between Nash and Oakley is ambiguous. Clearly quite intimate, they appear to have never been romantic partners, though many letters reference this possibility. Oakley married the Grimsdale’s nephew Gerald in 1916.