Watercolour over pen and ink and traces of pencil, 28.5 by 34.5 cm (11 ¼ by 13 ½ ins) 

Literature:  W. Shakespeare, The Tragedie of King Lear; Newly Published from the First Folio of 1623, Ernest Benn Ltd, London, 1927, illustrated as a colour plate; Brian Webb & Peyton Skipwith, Paul Nash/John Nash Design, Antique Collectors’ Club, 2006, p.35 (for illustrations of two other colour plates from the edition)

The present work is the original watercolour for one of five published colour plates that Paul Nash produced for a 1927 Ernest Benn edition of King Lear. The watercolour is a visualization of Act 1, Scene 1 of the play and was reproduced as a full page opposite text from the scene. Nash’s illustrations for King Lear are widely considered to be a high point in his work as a book illustrator, the Nash scholar Andrew Causey observing: “In his designs for King Lear…Nash had captured something of this superhuman scale by restricting himself to compositions of great simplicity in which the formalized figures were all but crushed by the weight of the empty space around them…King Lear was an outstanding production…among work in the mid-twenties”. (Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, 1980, p.167)