SOLD


John Nash:
The River at Bures, Suffolk, m
Framed (ref: 124)
Signed in pencil, Pencil and watercolour, 13 1/4 x 17 7/8 in. (34 x 45.5 cm.)
Provenance: Percy Horton; thence by descent

Tags: John Nash pencil watercolour

Provenance: Percy Horton; thence by descent

Bures, located on the border between South Suffolk and North Essex, is divided by the river Stour, which forms the county boundary. The artist Percy Horton, to whom this watercolour belonged, was a friend and contemporary of Nash; both taught at the Ruskin School of Art, and both had a particular attachment to the East Anglian landscape. In 1931 Nash rented a cottage at Wiston-by-Nayland, a village on the Stour, near Bures. Here he painted regularly, before buying and moving to Bottengoms Farmhouse, in Wormingford, near Colchester, after being demobilised in 1944. In his monograph on Nash, Rothenstein wrote: 'his environment was a continuing source of inspiration, in particular, as it always had been, the presence, and here it was all but omnipresence, of water, whether spring, pond, waterfall, stream or ditch.' John Rothenstein, John Nash, 1983, p. 86. A Suffolk Landscape, an oil of 1937, was bought by the Tate in 1939, soon after John Rothenstein became director. This is one of twelve works held by the Tate.