John Nash Steps Out Of Big Brother's Shadow

Paul Nash may be better known but his brother was more gifted, says Andrew Lambirth, and had a rare eye for untidy British landscapes

- Andrew Lambirth

Why isn’t the artist John Nash (1893-1977) better known to the gallery-going public?

Principally because his very particular achievement has been chronically overshadowed by his more flamboyant, publicity-seeking and self-consciously radical older brother, Paul.

In their lifetimes, and particularly at the start of their careers, they were spoken of and written about as the Nash brothers and romantic landscape painters, but Paul swiftly outstripped John. This was ironic as John was the more naturally gifted of the two and, besides being a draughtsman of real quality and inventive with watercolour, was a better painter in oils than Paul until the 1930s, when Paul came into his own after a lengthy apprenticeship.

He was nothing like the simple, rustic recluse he is sometimes made out to have been. John Nash loved fishing and gardening as much as he loved painting, but he was no country mouse.

He taught at the Royal College of Art and enjoyed a varied social life in London with friends and lovers. Both Nash brothers were allergic to sexual fidelity, and John had even more girlfriends than Paul. It was only in later years that John began to spend more time in the country, and he still went up to London regularly to the Royal Academy, which had voted him a member in 1940. He worked hard, painting every day at home in his studio, or drawing out in the landscape.

I lived in Suffolk for ten years, within a short drive of many of Nash’s favourite stretches of countryside. During my researches for a monograph on John Nash, I got to know the author Ronald Blythe quite well, who had inherited the Nashes’ old home, Bottengoms Farm, on the borders of Essex and Suffolk. Ronnie, happily still with us at 96, had been great friends with both John and his wife, Christine; he dedicated his hugely successful book Akenfield (1969) to John.