Winter Landscape, Iver

‘O Dreaming trees, sunk in a swoon of sleep, What have ye seen in these mysterious places?’ (Paul Nash, poem written for Mercia Oakley, c.1909). Paul Nash (1889-1946) described how his ‘love of the monstrous and the magical led me beyond the confines of natural appearances into unreal worlds’.This work shows the garden of Nash’s family home at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire. In the foreground is a group of trees, which he nicknamed ‘The Three’. Nash liked to invest trees with distinct personalities, describing how he tried ‘to paint trees as tho’ they were human beings’. For Nash, this site had a talismanic quality which he called ‘the spirit of a place’ (or genius loci) - an intangible, elusive, sense of magic, together with a feeling of being outside of time.