The keys to Paul Nash’s kingdom

A new exhibition at Tate Britain unlocks the surrealist painter’s fascination with the land and seascapes of Dorset

One midsummer’s day in 1946, the British artist Paul Nash lay dying in a hotel in the seaside resort of Boscombe, outside Bournemouth. Earlier that year, he had contracted severe pneumonia, and he knew that he was unlikely to recover. With the help of his wife, Margaret, a former suffragette, he organised a final holiday on England’s south coast.

Boscombe was practical, because medical assistance was close at hand. More importantly for Nash, though, the town was also a gateway to Dorset, to the west. Since the Thirties, Dorset had occupied a special place in his heart and, shortly before his death, Nash longed to visit it again.

“It is a thrilling adventure for me because I shall see the sea,” he wrote to a friend towards the end of June. “Boscombe is next to Bournemouth, Bournemouth is next to Poole and Poole is next to Swanage. And there I am in my kingdom.” A fortnight later, Nash died, aged 57, having surveyed his “kingdom” one last time.

Throughout his life, particular places in the English landscape retained a certain magic for Nash, the subject of a forthcoming retrospective at Tate Britain. Avebury, with its megaliths, is an obvious example, as are the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, where Nash repeatedly painted the mysterious hilltop conclaves of centuries-old beech trees.

So is Dymchurch in Kent, where Nash produced a series of elemental seascapes incorporating the town’s coastal defences, while living in the village during the Twenties.

These haunting pictures are infused with an elegiac sense of the First World War, as though Nash was trying to exorcise his memories as an official war artist at the front line in the Ypres Salient. A few years earlier, his bleak paintings of battlefields obliterated by mechanised warfare had made his name.

Nash’s association with Dorset is less known. Yet his time during the Thirties living in and around the coastal town of Swanage, on a large, beautiful peninsula called the Isle of Purbeck, was surprisingly important for him, both creatively and emotionally. Nash became obsessed with Purbeck – commissioned by John Betjeman, he even wrote a Shell Guide to Dorset, which was published in 1936 (cover price: two and sixpence).

According to the art historian Pennie Denton, whose book Seaside Surrealism provides an authoritative account of Nash’s life in Swanage, he produced around 80 oil paintings and watercolours that relate to Dorset, as well as masses of photographs. “It was a remarkably creative period,” Denton tells me.

Moreover, in the summer of 1935, on the lawn of the Grosvenor Hotel in Swanage, Nash met the attractive surrealist artist Eileen Agar, who was 10 years his junior. “A small, trim, raven-haired man with an aquiline nose, distinctive allure, and a triangular look about him, was introduced as Paul Nash,” Agar wrote in her autobiography. They were soon embroiled in an affair, documented in a series of extraordinary letters kept by Agar that are now in the Tate’s archives.

“Eileen was the love of Nash’s life apart from Margaret, so the midThirties were a very intense period for him,” says Emma Chambers, the curator of Tate Britain’s exhibition. If Purbeck was Nash’s “kingdom”, Agar was his queen.

The son of a barrister, Nash first visited Swanage as a boy, on a happy family holiday. In his