The painting is a grim parody of the traditional British pastoral landscape, featuring
many of the traditional stylistic markers of the genre twisted by industrialized warfare. The
eye naturally focuses on the harsh contrast between the bright light reflecting off the pond
water, pooling within the innumerable shell holes that pockmark this devastated landscape.
Moreover, the artwork blends Nash’s later, more surrealist style, with the realism that had
been popular in the pre-war period. The eye is initially drawn to the background of the
painting by the harsh contrast of dark, unnaturally coloured clouds, that are advancing upon
the white clouds on the right of the painting. The focus of the piece, a blown-apart tree,
often a symbol of rebirth and growth in the pastoral tradition, has been warped by warfare.
Barbed wire appears to be born nonsensically from its shattered trunk into broken fences
that twist into each the foreground, guarding nothing more than water-filled shell holes.
The lush, manicured grass of the pastoral tradition is replaced by a pallid grey-brown
expanse of featureless mud, made shapeless and pitted by shelling. The darkness to the left
of the painting seems to be consuming the light emanating through the white clouds, the
dark cloud’s colouring of red and black implies an unnatural origin. Mankind’s existence in
pastoral painting creates an ordered beauty from the chaos of nature, this painting argues
that mankind has simply created a new kind of chaos.
This rejection of the conservative tradition of art is highly significant in the
emergence of modernism as a movement, and especially the romantic notion that mankind
produced order and beauty in their interactions with the natural world. The simple truth
revealed by the war was that chaos could just as easily be manufactured as grown. Art grew
to reflect this with the Dada movement being the prime example. Born in Germany and
officiated in 1920 with its first exhibition, it is a hard movement to define. As it is utterly
anarchic by nature, the very name means nothing at all. Dada was a mad movement,
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