Augsburg Raid, April 17 1942 by Paul Nash, watercolour and gouache on paper

Famed for his First World War works, in 1940 Nash was invited again to become an Official War Artist for the revived scheme chaired by Sir Kenneth Clark. When Clark’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee assigned him to the Air Ministry Nash made propagandist watercolours of RAF and crashed Luftwaffe aircraft.

This watercolour, however, was made after the Air Ministry commission and coincides with when Nash worked directly under the Ministry of Information, for whom he made four ambitious oil paintings: ‘The Battle of Britain’ (1941), ‘Totes Meer' (or 'Dead Sea', 1941), ‘Defence of Albion’ (1942), and ‘The Battle of Germany’ (1944). Anticipating the raid theme of the later Germany painting, in this watercolour Nash, who read reports in military periodicals, imagined the Lancaster bomber’s first daylight raid: on a Bavarian engine factory, 17 April 1942. As indicated by an inscription on the verso, Nash produced this watercolour as an illustration to Volume III of 'The War in Pictures' (Odhams Press Ltd, 1942). Like many artists, he struggled during the war to make ends meet, and he eagerly circulated prints of his work for propagandist purposes and additional remuneration. The Augsburg Raid (Operation Margin), as the longest low-level penetration raid undertaken in the Second World War, was well documented in Ministry of Information publicity, and Nash's illustration contributed to such celebratory discourse. Nash employed his usual artistic licence to represent the Lancaster bomber, with freehand, biomorphic, rather than accurately mechanical, characteristics. Representing the aircraft almost as a living creature, he explored imaginative ideas he wrote about a month earlier in the essay 'The Personality of Planes' (Vogue, March 1942). Purchased in 1982. Artist copyright: expired. Image copyright: RAF Museum.