Poisonous Plantations

Maker


1889-1946

Title

Poisonous Plantations

Date of Production

1931

Medium

graphite, black chalk or crayon, watercolour, touches of bodycolour, on wove paper, with multiple pinholes at all four corners and at upper and lower centre edges

Dimensions

Height: 30.8 cm
Width: 24.1 cm

Accession Number

D.2023.XX.11

Mode of Acquisition

gift, 2023

Credit

The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

Copyright

Work in the public domain

Location

Not currently on display

Label Text

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.

Notes

Preparatory study for the frontispiece of Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall and the Garden of Cyrus, published 1932. Nash spent the entire year of 1931 preparing his illustrations for the publication.

Provenance

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

Literature

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

Inscriptions

Inscription: Recto: upper right corner, graphite, erased, titled by artist: Poisonous Plantations; lower left under image, graphite, titled by artist: Poisonous Plantations; lower right under image, graphite, signed by artist: Paul Nash. Verso: lower right, graphite: 5.

Collector's mark: none.

Watermark: none.

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