Under the Hill

Under the Hill 1912 by Paul Nash (1889-1946). Ink and wash.

Nash has shown us a dense woodland of deciduous trees in full leaf with a bare grass slope in the foreground. Rooks circle above the trees in the sky.

This is one of Nash's earliest drawings of Wittenham Clumps, at Sinodun, Wallingford, Oxfordshire. He first visited the Clumps in 1908-9 when his family stayed nearby at Sinodun House. In 1959 Paul Nash described these visits thus: 'The great massed trees of the wood which we were invited to enter by an opening – the path through the wood – seem precisely that part of the early forest where the polecat still yelled in the night hours.'

Nash became one of the most evocative painters of the British landscape of the twentieth-century. Along with artists such as Eric Ravilious, Graham Sutherland and John Piper, Nash sought to reconcile, in his words, ‘Going Modern’ with ‘Being British.’