Pencil, pen and ink

Nash achieved recognition as a landscape and still-life painter in oils and watercolours and was widely exhibited. He was also a fine wood engraver, and a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers which was set up in 1920. Nash became a brilliant and prolific illustrator. The art of wood engraving was revived at the same time that private presses were springing up, and Nash was sought out by the Golden Cockerel Press, the Blackmore Press, and the Cresset Press among others.

Nash was never limited to one media, and later worked for the Curwen Press, producing colour autolithographs, and fine line drawings. Nash placed great emphasis upon the responsibility of the illustrator to the text in question. An illustrator’s role, he wrote, is ‘not merely to make picture books but to convey by his illustrations an enhanced sense of the book and its impact on the artist’.

References: Horne, Alan. The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators: 106-107; J. Greenwood. The Wood engravings of John Nash, 1987