We are Making a New World

This work, based on the drawing, 'Sunrise. Inverness Copse', is one of the most memorable images of the First World War. The title mocks the ambitions of the war, as the sun rises on a scene of the total desolation. The landscape has become un-navigable, unrecognisable and utterly barren. The mounds of earth act almost as gravestones amongst the death and desolation. Nash was looking for a new kind of symbolism divorced from the more traditional Symbolist principles. He realised that the ideas he had been presenting in a figurative way before the war could be more meaningful in pure landscape form.