John Mcewen comments on Mill Building

IN 1967, John Nash—paul’s younger brother—became the first living Royal Academician to have a major retrospective at the Royal Academy (RA). Fellow artist Frederick Gore RA wrote in the catalogue: ‘His simplicity has a sharp edge; he notices the extraordinary shapes of ordinary things and how exotic the English countryside really is.’ Posthumously, Nash’s work as an illustrator has eclipsed his art, although Andrew Lambirth, Country Life contributor and foremost chronicler of recent British art, with 50 books to his credit, justly concentrates on the paintings and drawings in his 2020 biography.

This painting is one of many showing a Stour Valley subject, Boxted, on the river boundary of Essex and Suffolk. Nash’s wife, Christine, knowing his love of water as a subject, noted on a 1929 visit to the valley: ‘Good river scenery, Think we may stay here.’ They did, settling for good in 1944.

In 1969, friend and neighbour Ronald (Akenfield) Blythe made a film about Nash in which he said of this Constable, now also Nash, country: ‘For John Nash, the fascination of the Stour Valley… was that here was the order that he loved in particularly exciting conflict with the wilderness which he also loved. Here was the reflecting water, which so intrigued him, distributed in every variety of pond, ditch, mill-race, field drain and spring.’

Nash is best known for his First World War masterpiece Over the Top and 1918 pastoral The Cornfield (also Tate Collections). This watery subject is the essence of his later art. Chelmsford Museum and Art Gallery has a winter version.