Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/104

 ; and where an effect of solidity and massive repose is produced, it is marred by his persistent use of stucco in the same monotonous tint. This gave rise to the well-known epigram (Quarterly Review, June 1826): Augustus at Rome was for building renown'd, For of marble he left what of brick he had found; But is not our Nash, too, a very great master? He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster. Nash made great use of cast-iron in his buildings, and took out several patents for this purpose. He had many pupils and assistants, among them being Augustus Pugin [q. v.], who was led very much by Nash's advice and encouragement to the study of Gothic architecture. Nash was in every way a liberal encourager of art and artists, and in private life was highly esteemed; but the excessive patronage lavished on Nash by George IV brought him many enemies, especially after the king's death. His books, prints, and drawings, including a large number of his original architectural designs, were sold by auction at Evans's, Pall Mall, on 15 July 1835, and following days. A portrait of Nash by Sir Thomas Lawrence is at Jesus College, Oxford, placed there at his own request, instead of pecuniary recompense for work done on behalf of the college; and a bust of him is in the Royal Institute of British Architects. He frequently exhibited his designs at the Royal Academy.

 NASH, JOSEPH (1809–1878), water-colour painter and lithographer, son of the Rev. Okey Nash, who kept the Manor House School at Croydon, was born at Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, on 17 Dec. 1809. He was educated by his father, and at the age of twenty-one commenced the study of architecture under the elder Pugin [see, (1762–1832)], whom he accompanied to France, and for whose work, ‘Paris and its Environs,’ 1830, he made some of the drawings. In the early stage of his career Nash was much occupied on figure subjects illustrating the poets and novelists, and exhibited many drawings of that class with the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, of which he was elected an associate in 1834; of these some were engraved for the ‘Keepsake,’ and similar publications. But he earned celebrity by his picturesque views of late Gothic buildings, English and foreign, which he enlivened with figures grouped to illustrate the habits of their owners in bygone days, somewhat in the manner of Cattermole. Having at an early period mastered the art of lithography, Nash utilised it in the production of several excellent publications; his ‘Architecture of the Middle Ages’ appeared in 1838, and between 1839 and 1849 his great work, in four series, ‘Mansions of England in the Olden Time,’ which was highly successful, and has maintained its reputation. In 1846 he lithographed Wilkie's ‘Oriental Sketches,’ and in 1848 a set of views of Windsor Castle from his own drawings. Other works to which Nash contributed were Lawson's ‘Scotland Delineated,’ 1847–54, ‘Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851,’ McDermot's ‘The Merrie Days of England,’ 1858–9, and ‘English Ballads,’ 1864. He became a full member of the Water-Colour Society in 1842, and was a constant exhibitor up to 1875, sending many of the original drawings for the above publications, with occasionally subjects from Shakespeare, &c. In his views of buildings Nash aimed chiefly at picturesque effect, paying little attention to structural detail; he followed James Duffield Harding [q. v.] in his free use of body colour, and his lithographs are executed in the tinted style made popular by that artist. He died at Hereford Road, Bayswater, London, 19 Dec. 1878, having a few months before been granted a civil-list pension of 100l. His only son, Joseph, is a painter of marine subjects, and has been a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours since 1886. The South Kensington Museum possesses some examples of Nash's art.

 NASH, MICHAEL (fl. 1796), protestant controversialist, may have been the son of Richard Nash, who married Sarah Joyce on 26 Aug. 1723 at St. James's, Clerkenwell, London (Harl. Soc. Reg. xiii. 248), though a passage in one of his controversial pamphlets (The Windmill Overturned, p. 43) reads like a confession of illegitimate birth. Nash is conjecturally credited with the authorship of ‘Stenography, or the most easy and concise Method of writing Shorthand, on an entire new Plan, adapted to every Capacity, and to the use of Schools,’ Norwich, 1783. In 1784 one ‘Michael Nash of Homerton, Middlesex, gentleman,’ was granted a patent specification for making blacking, No. 1421.

Although often described as a methodist minister, Nash was a member of the church of England. In December 1791 he was 