How you can use this image

This image can be used for non-commercial research or private study purposes, and other UK exceptions to copyright permitted to users based in the United Kingdom under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended and revised. Any other type of use will need to be cleared with the rights holder(s).

Review the copyright credit lines that are located underneath the image, as these indicate who manages the copyright (©) within the artwork, and the photographic rights within the image.

The collection that owns the artwork may have more information on their own website about permitted uses and image licensing options.

Review our guidance pages which explain how you can reuse images, how to credit an image and how to find images in the public domain or with a Creative Commons licence available.

Notes

Add or edit a note on this artwork that only you can see. You can find notes again by going to the ‘Notes’ section of your account.

With 'Solstice of the Sunflower' (1945), this is one of the artist’s final two oil paintings. The year after it was made, Nash, who had been diagnosed with bronchial asthma in 1933, caught pneumonia and died on the 11th July, aged only 57. He had long been fascinated by the mysteries of landscape and man’s involvement with it. As an official War Artist in World War I, he witnessed the near annihilation of both, and painted it in 'We Are Making a New World' (1918). Over the desolate craters and shattered trees, however, shafts of sunlight seem to promise nature’s ability to renew itself. A similar promise seems to be inherent in the heavenly body looming through the clouds above the WWII commission Totes Meer (1940–1941), providing a reassuring reference point over a landscape created by a mass of smashed German aircraft that, as Nash’s title points out, appear at first to be a dead sea.