WAR POET MEETS WAR PAINTER
SASSOON, Siegfried; Paul NASH, illustrator.
Nativity.
London, Faber & Gwyer, 1927.
8vo, pp. [4]; full-page linocut illustration in three colours by Paul Nash; a very good copy, pamphlet-stitched in publisher’s original printed purple wrappers by Nash; very slightly sunned, corners lightly worn.
First edition of this striking collaboration between Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Paul Nash (1889–1946).
Nativity is one of four poems – along with To My Mother, In Sicily, and To the Red Rose – contributed by Sassoon to the ‘Ariel Poems’. The series, published by Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber) under the direction of its poetry editor T.S. Eliot, published thirty-eight illustrated four-page poems between 1927 and 1931. Nash had been appointed an official war artist in 1917, gaining widespread fame through his drawings made in the aftermath of the Battle of Passchendaele. His illustrations to Nativity reflect his increasing tendency toward abstraction in the late 1920s, ‘a direction Nash ultimately admitted he was unsuited to’ (ODNB). At this time he ‘also explored the metaphysical art of the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, a highly productive encounter which was to lead him towards his own personal version of surrealism’ (ibid.).
Keynes A27a.
