NEAC Annual Lecture 2026: John Nash

Tuesday 16 June, 6pm to 8pm

Lecture start: 6.30pm

Andy Friend, the giver of this year’s NEAC Annual Lecture, has written a well researched book on the life of John Nash entitled The Landscape of Love and Solace. John and his brother Paul, both early NEAC members, will be the subject of Andy’s lecture, in which he will rescue John from the unfair tendency to consign him to Paul’s shadow. Despite some stylistic similarities and a temporary overlap of concerns during the war, they are very different artists, as Andy will make clear.

The NEAC’s proud tradition of art that emerges from closely observing the world around us had, from the outset, a radical element to it. The early members were challenging not just the stylistic staleness of the Royal Academy’s salon and
history paintings, but the subject matter itself, which celebrated the world of the aristocracy, classical mythology, military valour and imperial conquest. Their shift towards interrogating their immediate surroundings marked a change of focus: away from wealth and ceremony and towards the everyday lives of ordinary people. This took a particularly raw extreme when the brothers John and Paul Nash were invited to become war artists during the First World War. Far from glorifying what they saw, as past war artists had done, they responded viscerally to the terrifying and senseless carnage they witnessed.

Those early war paintings by both Nash brothers look anything but anachronistic over a century later. We have a horrendous war on the European continent, much of it fought using tanks and trenches, with huge loss of life and little territorial gain. The Nash brothers’ profound horror at the senselessness of war feels incredibly relevant. At the same time, those works sit firmly within the NEAC tradition of responding to the visual world around us. They were painted from scribbled sketches made on the front line. Truthful looking was at their core.

Patrick Cullen PNEAC

How to Book

Tickets £10, or Free to Friends of the NEAC and Mall Galleries

Tickets include free admission to the NEAC Annual Exhibition 2026 (normally £7)

Images: Paul Nash NEAC (1889-1946), Ghost of the Megaceros Hibernicus (1942) (detail); John Nash NEAC (1893-1977), The Villa Next Door. Claviers (1975)