Wood of the Nightmares' Tales, 1937 is a poetic and resonant work in which the artistic influences Paul Nash had absorbed over the preceding two decades are assimilated into one powerful image.

The painting takes as its subject the horse-tail plant (also known as the mare’s tail to which Nash cleverly refers in the title) which grew in carboniferous swamps 200 million years ago. Here, we see this primitive growth emerging from the sea, like some kind of sea-monster, with alarming effect. The title implies that what appears before us is an imagined landscape, encountered in a dream or, indeed nightmare, and shows the artist utilising the power of the unconscious to access the imagery for his art. He would do this in another major work from this period, Landscape from a Dream, 1936-8. This engagement with the power of the unconscious mind is closely aligned to the practice of many surrealist artists and their adherence to automatism and, although Nash insisted that he was not part of The Surrealist Party, writing to Herbert Read in 1942, ‘I did not find Surrealism, Surrealism found me,’ the influence of certain aspects of this movement on his work is undeniable. Indeed, Nash would go on to write that surrealism, ‘…has given me inspiration & refreshment of mind...’ and he did not hide his admiration for the work of many surrealist artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Andre Masson. Nash felt a special affinity with the imagery in much of Max Ernst’s work and in his review of Ernst’s exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in 1933, he states,

‘…to abandon yourself to the whole of what this imaginative painter has to offer, without reserve, than to approach each new expression with fear or doubt. That is not to say it is wise for your soul, but, if you can follow the sublime or dangerous explorations of Ernst’s mind, you will encounter new experiences; and you must face evil as well as good.’

Though Ernst had an effect on Nash’s painting as early as 1934, it was not until 1937, when he created Wood of the Nightmares' Tales, that Nash was able to take full advantage of the surrealist artist’s influence, fusing elements of this with his own highly poetic understanding of the landscape, both encountered and imagined. Nash was particularly impressed by Ernst’s visions of the forest (see for example, Forest and Dove, 1927) which he approached in mythic terms, writing that,

‘They are, it seems, savage and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow. . . . Naked, they dress only in their majesty and their mystery.’

Many of Ernst’s forests appear menacing and while an explicit sense of terror is uncommon in Nash’s visions of nature, it is felt acutely in the present drawing. In its temperament, Wood of the Nightmares' Tales is more closely aligned to Ernst’s darker visions of a primitive world than any of Nash’s other work.

Many surrealist artists, including Ernst, viewed the forest as a symbol for the human unconscious and he we find Nash using this particular imagery to explore ‘the primitive in man seen through pictorial analogues in nature.’ Horse tail or Equisetum is a ‘living fossil’ and is the only living genus of the entire class Equisetopsida, which for over one hundred million years dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests. Here Nash recalls the primitiveness of early forms of life in order to explore the idea of the primitive in man as a broader theme. Andrew Causey has suggested an overtly sexual element to this work (again unusual for Nash), noting that in the book the artist was preparing for publication before his death, he placed this work alongside Stone Forest, 1937, so that the horse tails appear more phallic than ever when placed next to the stone nests in the adjacent image.

Nash uses the landscape as a metaphor for his mind and the symbolic appropriation of nature as a means by which to explore broader themes and this was a central part of his practice since he began making art. As David Fraser Jenkins has written,

‘Nash had the kind of mind to imagine the countryside broken down into the fundamental forces of nature. He was anxious that his paintings should be taken as illusive although what they showed was precise and clearly outlined. Their suggestiveness follows from their concentration and oddity, and the pictures need to be read.’

Writing in the year he made this work, Nash detailed the development of this imagery, stating,

‘Ever since the discovery that pictorially, for me at least, the forms of natural objects and the features of landscape were sufficient without the intrusion of human beings, or even animals. I have pursued a diverse research in land and by the sea, interpreting the phenomena of Nature without ever missing men or women from the scene.

Gradually however, the landscape as a scene, ceased to be absorbing. Some drama of beings, after all, seemed to be necessary. A few attempts to escape into the refuge of abstract design proved me unsuited. But at this point I began to discover the significance of the so-called inanimate object. Henceforth Nature became endowed for me with new life. The landscape too now seemed possessed of a different animation. To contemplate the personal beauty of a stone and leaf, bark and shell, and to exalt them to be the principals of imaginary happenings, became a new interest.’

Nash’s final sentence is highly pertinent to the present work in which images from nature are transformed by the artist’s own imaginings. Each element in the picture; the horse-tail plant, the sea and the sun are altered in a process of metamorphosis and become highly-charged symbols of other themes, emotions and ideas and herein lies the power of Nash’s landscapes from this period. As Roger Cardinal has written,

‘A metaphoric way of construing landscapes and objects, one so intense as to stimulate the process of metamorphosis, is then, one of the most essential elements of Nash’s creative vision.’