Poisonous Plantations

The British surrealist Paul Nash (1889-1946) is best known today for his paintings created in response to both World Wars, the first of which he witnessed first-hand as a war artist. Printmaking and book illustration also formed an important strand of his career. In 1931 he was invited to provide illustrations for a book of his choice and chose two treatises by the polymath Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus (1658), producing a set of 32 chalk drawings which were reproduced as monotone collotypes, subsequently coloured first with watercolour and then with stencils for the final prints. Poisonous Plantations is one of the designs for the illustrations. Taking a favourite subject – an indoor still life set against a view of a garden through a window – Nash juxtaposes the mundane and the bizarre. He imbues everyday objects (a vase, a champagne flute and an hourglass) with a sense of the uncanny and creeping menace, not least with the large, unblinking eye staring out of the vase and the ambiguous identity of the plants it contains (one of which may be deadly nightshade). The new edition of Urne Buriall was published by Cassell & Co. in 1932; although it sold poorly, it won critical acclaim, and is generally regarded as one of Nash’s key achievements as an illustrator. Many of the motifs he first addressed in Urne Buriall appeared in, and were further developed in, his later paintings.

John Steegman, 1934; Sotheby’s, London, 4 March 1959 (lot 64), where purchased by Chesterman; Reid Gallery, London, where purchased by Alastair John Smith, 1959; gifted to The Courtauld November 2023

Causey, Andrew, Paul Nash, Oxford 1980
cat. no. no. 761