Oxenbridge Pond

Paul Nash moved to Oxenbridge Cottage in Iden, East Sussex, in 1925 with his wife Margaret, and remained there until 1930. The pond in this painting is at Oxenbridge Farm, a working farm in the same village owned by Bertram and Kitty Buchanan — close friends of the Nashes. Bertram Buchanan had also served as a war artist, and the farm became a recurring subject for Nash throughout his Iden years. Nash had been an official war artist in both World Wars; his first-hand experience of the devastated landscape of the Western Front transformed his understanding of what landscape painting could mean, and the rural subjects of the 1920s carry an undertone of that earlier intensity. This painting is considered one of his last works in a broadly conventional landscape mode — within a year or two of completing it, Nash's encounter with a Giorgio de Chirico exhibition in London in 1928 began his turn toward Surrealism, which dominated his output through the 1930s. He went on to co-found Unit One in 1933 alongside Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson. The painting was purchased by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1950, four years after Nash's death.