We Are Making a New World



We are Making a New World is a 1918 oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Nash. The optimistic title contrasts with Nash's depiction of a scarred landscape created by the First World War, with shell-holes, mounds of earth, and leafless tree trunks. Perhaps Nash's first major painting and his most famous work, it has been described as one of the best British paintings of the 20th century, and has been compared to Picasso's Guernica. The work was among the first oil paintings produced by Nash. It was based on his 1918 pen-and-ink drawing Sunrise, Inverness Copse, which depicts the remains of a small group of trees at Inverness Copse, near Ypres in Belgium. Both works were exhibited in a solo exhibition entitled "The Void of War" at the Leicester Galleries in May 1918.

Nash had signed up shortly after the outbreak of the First World War with the Artists' Rifles. He transferred to the Hampshire Regiment and was sent to the front at Ypres. He had a passionate attachment to the natural world and regarded the deformation brought about the war with horror.

In 1917 Nash returned to England having broken several ribs from a fall into a trench. Soon afterwards the Battle of Passchendaele took place which left 200,000 British killed or wounded. Nash lobbied the Foreign Office to be allowed to return to the front as an official war artist. He wrote to his wife Margaret : " I am no longer an artist...I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever..."

The painting measures 71.1 xx. It depicts a bright white sun rising above ruddy brown clouds, shining beams down on a desolated green landscape below, with unnatural mounds of earth piled up between the skeletal remains of blasted trees. Nash's style is developed from Cubism and Vorticism.