The Menin Road (painting)

The Menin Road is a large oil painting by Paul Nash completed in 1919 that depicts a First World War battlefield. Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to paint a battlefield scene for the proposed, but never built, national Hall of Remembrance. The painting is considered one of the most iconic images of World War One and is now held by the Imperial War Museum.

Commission
In April 1918 Nash was commissioned, by the British War Memorials Committee, to paint a battlefield scene for the proposed, but never built, national Hall of Remembrance. He decided to depict a section of the Ypres Salient known as 'Tower Hamlets' that had been devastated during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. Nash originally intended to call the painting A Flanders Battlefield but he eventually decided to name it The Menin Road. The actual road itself, the modern N8, was the main route between Ypres and Menin and passed the sites of several other battles including Sanctuary Wood, Hooge Crater, Inverness Copse and Hellfire Corner. Nash knew the area well both from the spring of 1917, when he served in the British Army on the Western Front and from later that year when he returned to the war zone as an official war artist. Nash himself had come under shellfire when travelling along the route and had the quick reactions of his driver to thank for his surrival. He considered 'Tower Hamlets' to be "perphaps the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War."

Description
Nash started painting the huge canvas, which was almost sixty square foot in size, at Tubbs Farm near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire using a herb drying shed as a studio in June 1918. He shared the space with his brother, John Nash, who was working on his own picture, Over the Top at the same time. When they had to leave the shed Paul Nash struggled to find somewhere to work on his painting but eventually, after using two other locations, completed The Menin Road in a room in Gower Street in London in February 1919. The room was so small that to view the canvas in full Nash had to climb out the window.

The Menin Road depicts a landscape of flooded shell craters and trenches while tree stumps, devoid of any foliage, point towards a sky full of clouds and plumes of smoke bisected by shafts of sunlight resembling gun barrels. Two soldiers at the centre of the picture attempt to follow the, almost, unrecognisable road itself but appear to be trapped by the landscape. Nash composed the picture in three broad strips. The foreground is filled with shell craters and debris which block access to the road in the middle of the picture. The only possible path, to the side of one of the mud pools is blocked by a fallen board. Across the centre of the picture shellholes punch into the road at regular intervals while debris further breaks up the road, as do the shadows from a line of trees alongside it. Beyond the trees, the battlefield stretches to the horizon with a wood of stunted trees on the right hand side and to the left a series of seven zig-zagging streams that also fail to reach the horizon and escape the landscape. In due course, Nash came to consider this painting to be his finest work.