Master Art

obviously romantic, though the frequent absence of figures often gives them an air of melancholy or mystery. Eric Ravillious, another significant British watercolourist from the first half of the century, and one who was taught by Nash whilst a student at the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s, used the same conceit to similar effect throughout his foreshortened career. Though an enigmatic impression is less obvious in this particular work, the art historian Andrew Causey wrote that the ‘wheeling birds over many of Nash’s landscapes are his emblems of freedom and release from the uncertainty and changeability of life.’ Describing this period of his artistic development in his autobiography, Outline, Nash wrote of an attempt ‘to introduce a sleeping woman’ into a landscape of a cornfield ‘but the elements would not agree. It was really a cast back to D[ante] G[abriel] R[ossetti] but my nostalgia let me in for such complicated and dangerous processes of elimination in getting rid of the body that I learned a lesson there and then. Figures cannot easily be introduced into landscape. From the first conception they must be an integreal part of the structure of the composition.’