Signed with monogram l.l.: PN

Coloured crayon with soft pencil, 9 by 13 cm (3 ½ by 5 ¼ ins)

Provenance: from the artist to the Curwen Press; Oliver Simon, director of the Curwen Press; Stanley Jones

Literature:  Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, 1980, see under nos.752-763 (p.422)

Nash’s visionary depiction of The Nest of the Phoenix is one of his finest works from the later 1930s (see fig.below). Its conception, however, occurred far earlier as part of his illustrations for an edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall and the Garden of Cyrus. That is now generally considered to be his most important work as a book illustrator and was published by the Curwen Press in 1932. The present drawing was originally in the collection of Nash’s great friend (and director and typographer of the Curwen Press) Oliver Simon. It is almost certainly one of the few surviving small pencil and crayon illustrations, made by Nash to help the Curwen artists realise his ambition for the project. Although small in scale, this drawing’s vivid and intense portrayal of the immortal regenerating bird of the title (one so central to ancient mythology), gets to the heart of Nash’s visionary status within British art and looks forward to his sometimes apocalyptic paintings from the early 1940s.