F ew artists of the 20th century captured the spirit of a place as evocatively and memorably as Paul Nash, whose vivid images of wartime destruction established him as one of the most important painters of his generation.

He used the term genius loci - the spirit of a place - to refer to his landscape painting, but it could be applied equally to his war painting, which he unashamedly used "in the character of a weapon" to hammer home the "bitter truth" of the horror and futility of conflict.

He was born in London on May 11, 1889, the son of a successful barrister, William Harry Nash. His mother's family had Navy connections, and early on it seemed that Paul was destined to follow in their footsteps. But - fortuitously, as it turned out - he failed the entrance exam, and finished his education at St Paul's School, before going on to study at Chelsea Polytechnic School of Art (1906-8) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1910-11), where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Stanley Spencer, Mark Gether, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth.

At the suggestion of painter Sir William Richmond, Nash devoted his early career to capturing nature. He was inspired by the poetry of William Blake and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, but the style he developed was entirely his own; a modernistic, abstract approach, with a lightness of touch and a mysterious, but very English, quality that had its roots in Romanticism.

Later, between the two world wars, he became one of the pioneers of the Surrealist movement in Britain, and this was increasingly reflected in his own work. His favourite subjects were those that evoked a sense of history, such as ancient burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts, standing stones and clumps of trees.

Even before he moved to Oxford, he was frequently drawn to Wittenham Clumps, which he painted several times.

But it is on Nash's wartime paintings and drawings that his lasting fame rests. After being invalided out of the First World War in 1917, he used some of the sketches he had made on the front line to produce a series of drawings of the war. They were exhibited to great acclaim at the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street, London, and resulted in an invitation by Charles Masterman, head of the War Propaganda Bureau, to become an official war artist.

Nash returned to the Western Front in November 1917, just after the Battle of Passchendaele, and the horrific scenes of devastation that awaited him prompted him to write to his wife, Margaret: "Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be the master of the ceremonies in this war: no glimmer of God's hand is seen. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous mockeries to man; only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds or through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land."

His despair translated itself into the stark images that he produced over the next few months. Among his most famous paintings from this era are The Menin Road, The Ypres Salient at Night, The Mule Track, A Howitzer Firing, Ruined Country and Spring in the Trenches.

Following an exhibition of his drawings and oil paintings at the Leicester Galleries in 1918, he was commissioned to paint for the newly-established Imperial War Museum, as well as for the Canadian war records.

Between the two wars, Nash found himself strangely disorientated, noting that he was now "a war artist without a war".

But he soon busied himself designing textiles and ceramics, illustrating books, designing the costumes and scenery for J M Barrie's satirical play The Truth about the Russian Dancers (1920), and spearheading a revival in the art of wood-engraving. He also taught design at the Royal College of Art.

A move to Dymchurch in Kent, in 1919, prompted Nash to begin his famous series of sea paintings, and he also began to develop his use of watercolours, largely inspired by French painter Cézanne. Soon afterwards, he produced a couple of books - Places (1922), a collection of landscape wood-engravings accompanied by short poems, and Genesis (1924).

Over the next decade he contributed regularly to Architectural Review and Country Life, and was commissioned by John Betjeman to write the Dorset Shell Guide for the Shell-Mex series.

Just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Nash and his wife moved to Oxford, staying first at the Randolph Hotel and later lodging in Beaumont Street and Holywell Street, before settling at 106 Banbury Road in 1940. By the following year, he was once again employed as a war artist, this time for the Air Ministry and later for the Ministry of Information.

One of Nash's most dramatic images of this period was Totes Meer (Dead Sea), a graphic depiction of wrecked German aircraft piled up at a dump in Cowley. Nash thought it looked like "a great inundating sea . . . the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no: nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead".

The painting was completed in 1941, and presented to the Tate Collection by the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1946.

Sadly, Nash's years in Oxford were blighted by the asthma that had dogged him since childhood, causing him to reflect how illness could "cripple life".

As his condition deteriorated, he became a frequent patient at the Acland Nursing Home in the Banbury Road. He died on July 11, 1946, while on holiday in Bournemouth, and was buried at Langley Church, Buckinghamshire, where his family had their roots.

A blue plaque was unveiled at 106 Banbury Road in July last year, in recognition of a man whose work remains a lasting tribute to all those who fought and suffered in the two world wars.

He had, according to art critic Roger Fry, a "very special talent for recording a certain poetical aspect" of war scenes "in a way that no other artist could".

Where to see Paul Nash paintings: Ashmolean Museum Beaumont Street, Oxford 01865 278000 www.ashmolean.org Imperial War Museum, London (includes the War Artists Archive) 020 7416 5320 www.iwm.org.uk Tate Britain, London 020 7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk Courtauld Institute of Art, London 020 7872 0220 www.courtauld.ac.uk