The Time by the Sea Read Online Free PDF

notes, to be transcribed on to canvas during the autumn and winter. Like most young artists, they roughed it in their first attempts to make a living. Christine made no bones about it. ‘We very often had some awful places to stay. We were hard up, and really we had to endure a great deal, but we did have to have the right kind of scenery!’
    They arrived at Wormingford Mill in fine style, however, due to the legacy of a sturdy 8.18 h.p. Talbot motor car which the previous owner, their dear friend Francis Unwin, used to drive round Brooklands. Unwin, one of the finest etchers of his time, had died from tuberculosis in Mundesley Sanatorium in Norfolk in 1925, and it was partly from a number of sad visits to him that John Nash had become attracted to East Anglia. His roots were in the Chilterns but family connections near Colchester had made him familiar with the Suffolk–Essex border. Paul Nash had actually taken part in the epic 1909 Colchester Pageant, and both myself and John were to wear his Tudor costume on fancy-dress occasions half a century later. But Wormingford in 1929 was entirely new to John and Christine, and when the sun came out by the flower-choked river, the village’s potential as a working-holiday location was evident. Some might say, ‘No wonder, with Gainsborough painting almost up to it and Constable almost down from it!’ But these celebrated associations meant curiously little to John. He himself was to become famous for what appeared to be an indifference to any art other than his own, and this not because of pride, but because of the way in which he was so entirely domi nated by his own vision of landscape. Sickert used to warn artists off the Stour Valley, saying it was a ‘sucked orange’, but John Nash painted it as though he had never heard of it being the most familiar river territory in English art.
    The holiday house turned out to be a little clapboard bungalow adjacent to the Mill with a rustic fence and a view of the race. Box Brownie camera snapshots show an easel set up on the bridge, a punt containing a picnic and a portable gramophone, and John poling it through the reedy water, dressed in pyjama trousers and a jersey; Christine bathing and fellow artists sketching. The unpropitious June of 1929 had turned hot, and the long association with Wormingford had begun. He was thirty-six and had been an artist for seventeen years. In this comparatively short time he had taught himself to paint, to be a first-rate botanist and a good musician. He had achieved considerable recognition with his first show, had fought on the Western Front with the Artists’ Rifles, had as an official War Artist painted two of the greatest pictures of the fighting, had married a half-German, half-Scots Slade student named ChristineKühlenthal, and was at this moment one of the leaders of the renaissance of book illustration which had taken place during the 1920s. He was a slight young man with large aquiline features and reddish-brown hair. His wife Christine was tall and dark. She no longer painted – ‘One artist in the house is enough’ – but was at this time active in Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Dance and Song Society, and her interest in movement and drama would, years later, be fulfilled in the many plays which she produced or acted in at Wormingford. Her ‘dancing’ step – like Imogen Holst’s, a leggy kind of gracefulness – remained with her until old age – and I always loved the way in which she would take off for a long walk with never a thought about the distance or the weather. Once the two of us walked from Bottengoms to Stoke- by-Nayland in thin rain, and we regularly walked those perfect footpaths which meandered from the house to Sandy Hill, via the Grange, the mere and the high ground past the church. John used to call all this countryside ‘the Suffolk–Essex Highlands’ and he liked to surprise guests by taking them off to see such untypical East Anglian contours, but