John Northcote Nash, was the younger brother of the war artist Paul Nash (1889-1946). Born in London's Kensington in 1893, Nash and his family moved to Buckinghamshire in 1901. It was here that the garden of Wood Lane House at Iver Heath and the countryside of the Chiltern Hills greatly influenced him. After being educated at Wellington College, John started work as a trainee journalist but his life changed when his brother, who had enrolled at the Slade, brought home two fellow students, Claughton Pellew and Dora Carrington, who inspired him to become an artist. It was Dora who introduced him to his future wife Christine Kuhlensthal (1895-1976), another talented artist who also studied at the Slade with Paul Nash in the years immediately preceding World War One. John and Christine married in 1918.
Unlike his elder brother, John Nash did not receive any formal training, however held his first exhibition in 1913 and went on to exhibit with the Camden Town Group (1913-14) and soon after in 1915 with the London Group at the Goupil Gallery.
During the First World War, in 1916, Nash joined the ‘Artists Rifles’ before becoming an Official War Artist in 1918. From 1919 he then lived at Whiteleaf in Buckinghamshire where he became part of the renaissance of English book illustration. The drawings and engravings of this period especially reveal Nash’s knowledge of literature and botany as can be seen in his illustration of Poisonous Plants published in1927. During that period Nash also produced comic drawings inspired by Edward Lear, whose work he had seen in the home of his aunt Gussie, one of Lear’s girlfriends.
During the 1920s Nash taught at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and remained a teacher until the end of his life. During most of the interwar years John Nash and his wife lived at Meadle in Buckinghamshire. From there both went on holidays all over England during which they filled numerous sketch books with pen, pencil and wash studies which developed into oil and watercolour compositions in their studio.
Nash had a great passion for plants and he excelled as a plant illustrator and, like his friend Cedric Morris, called himself an ‘artist plantsman’.
In 1940 Nash was commissioned as an Official War Artist in the Royal Marines, a role he did not especially enjoy, preferring to paint the English landscape, which he did after the war. From 1922 Nash had made many visits to Essex and rented a summer cottage at Wormingford, near Colchester and in 1945 he and his wife bought Bottengoms Farm where they lived until they died. When in Essex Nash taught at Colchester Art School and conducted yearly plant illustration courses at Flatford Mill.
Nash was one of the founders of Colchester Art Society and later the Society’s President, serving from 1946 to 1977.
He became ARA in 1940 and RA in 1951. Nash was also appointed a CBE in 1964 and in 1967 was distinguished by being given the first ever retrospective exhibition of a living painter by the Royal Academy. Nash’s work can be found in many private and public collections such as the Tate Gallery, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.