Signed l.l.:  Paul Nash and titled (verso) Sunset Eye/Study 5

Watercolour, 29 by 40 cm. (11 ½  by 15 3/4 ins)

Provenance: With Arthur Tooth & Sons, London; Miss Ruth Clark, 1945; Margot Eates and Hartley Ramsden Sale; Sotheby's, London, 20 November 1991, lot 155; Jeff Horwood, thence by family descent; Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited: Oxford, Oxford Arts Club, Watercolours and Drawings by Paul Nash, February 1949, cat.no.29; London, Leicester Galleries, Paul Nash: A Private Collection of Watercolours and Drawings, May 1953, cat.no.20

Literature: Anthony Bertram, Paul Nash, The Portrait of an Artist, Faber and Faber, London, 1955, p.298; Margot Eates, Paul Nash, John Murray, London, 1973, p.87, p.137, pl.136 (col.ill); Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p.325, p.474, pl.394, cat.no.1260 (ill.b&w)

The present work was formerly in the collection of Margot Eates, one of the foremost scholars of Paul Nash’s work. She has written of his two great final watercolour series, of which one, Sunset Eye, this watercolour forms part of:

“In the Winter of 1945-46 he suddenly burst into the sunset glow of his two last great watercolour series…and the next few months were dedicated to transcribing his vision of the glowing, dying splendour… all possess a vastness of conception far transcending the narrow limits of the small sheets on which they are drawn… they possess an inner significance expressive of an acceptance of the natural sequence of dawn and dusk, rising and setting, life and death, which disassociates them from mere academic representationalism.” (Margot Eates (op cit) p.87)