Signed with monogram: PN and inscribed (verso)

Watercolour over pen and ink and pencil 18 by 26 cm

Provenance: The Mercury Gallery, London; Sotheby's London, 9 July 1970, lot 106
Exhibited: Milan, Galleria Sant'Ambrogio, October 1973, exhib. cat. no. 9 with ill.
Literature: Paul Nash. Paintings and Watercolours, Tate Gallery, November, December 1975, exhib. cat. p. 90, under no. 171; A. Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 443, no. 944

Nocturnal Landscape from 1938 (now in the Manchester Art Gallery (acc.1948.134)), is one of Nash's most celebrated and arresting surrealist works. Such pictures were pieced together from detritus he found on beach walks, including flints, stones and boulders. He later assembled them to form eerie, slightly uneasy imaginary landscapes. Relatively few studies for these paintings survive, the majority being painted directly from their assembly and not through related sketches. The present drawing shows Nash's early working ideas for this composition, including a central structure with a ball-like pebble which was abandoned in the final painting.