One of the compelling things about the work of the neoromantic 20th-century British artists, particularly Paul Nash, whose work is showing at Tate Britain, in London, until March 5, is the “wintriness” of their chosen landscapes; an emptiness coupled with a sense that someone has just left the scene.
Crisp as cast iron: the eryngium
Along with his brother, John, and others such as Eric Ravilious, Nash seems to revel in the things we think we hate most about winter: bare branches, plough furrows and ruts full of glassy water, with fences, crooked gates and hingeless doors bringing an intensity to a bare landscape we might otherwise have overlooked.
Without the feast of foliage and flower that warmer months present, it takes a little more effort to find beauty, but it