Ruins of a Church at Voormezeele

Ruins of a Church at Voormezeele 1917 watercolour by Paul Nash (1889-1946). 

Mounds of rubble lie beside the ruins of two houses, the charred remains of the rafters of that to the left of composition leaning precariously. In front of them stands a tree, its branches blasted and blackened. To extreme right, beyond the village, two memorial crosses are visible in a field. Two aeroplanes fly overhead. Rothenstein encouraged Nash’s interest in landscape painting and purchased this watercolour completed by Nash as Official War Artist (1917–1918). The experience of the war transformed Nash’s work.

“The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evily yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease…It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”
Paul Nash letter to Margaret Nash 13 November 1917, Tate Archive

‘Nash became one of the most evocative painters of the British landscape of the twentieth-century and gave Bottomley an unrivalled collection of his early watercolours and drawings. Nash is represented by over 100 works in the Tullie House collection which mainly date from the early part of his career.