Sunrise, Inverness Copse

This drawing formed the basis for Paul Nash's famous oil painting, 'We are Making a New World' (IWM ART 1146). Inverness Copse was a bitterly contested area of the Battle of Paschendaele in 1917. Nash captures the savage destruction wrought upon the landscape by picturing the shattered stumps of the former copse transformed into a vast cemetery of natural forms. The weak sunlight of the new dawn that illuminates the scene offers some hope of future redemption, but this is refuted by Nash’s own feelings that on the Western Front “sunset and sunrise are blasphemies, they are mockeries to man.”