Although Nash loved to paint the foliage of trees, out of which he made such good shapes in his paintings, he also relished the more abrupt effect of dead wood. As Ronald Blythe wrote in his book Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends (2008): 'My old friend John Nash enjoyed a dead tree.... John's landscapes like to put in a little bareness in summer, a bony white branch here or there, a great slain trunk upright on the horizon, a stark poplar in July.' As he himself admitted, Nash liked the greater abstraction of dead trees and stumps. His paintings were always well-designed and this was largely because he was so good at identifying the abstract in nature. Here the sharply pyramidal stump acts as a focus and counterpoint to the flowing rhythms of the surrounding trees and water.


Andrew Lambirth