to the coast to view one, Nash wrote to Eric Ravilious, who had painted flying boats in Scotland, asking him to describe the effect of sunlight on the plane. Nash's final painting for WAAC was however an extraordinary, imagined scene of a bombing raid on a city. Despite being given access to official reports and accounts from aircrews who had flown on raids to Germany, for the Battle of Germany, Nash adopted an unconventional abstract approach. Nash explained that it showed a city under attack with a pillar of smoke from burning buildings in the background and the white spheres of descending parachutes in the foreground. The pillar of smoke and the moon were as threatening to the city as the bombers, concealed within the red clouds, responsible for the explosions on the right side of the painting. Whilst Kenneth Clark found the painting difficult to understand because of what he called the "different planes of reality in which it is painted", he did recognize that it might herald one course that post-war art could take. Final works From 1942 onwards, Nash often visited the artist Hilda Harrisson at her home, Sandlands on Boars Hill near Oxford, to convalesce after bouts of illness. From the garden at Sandlands, Nash had a view of the Wittenham Clumps, which he had first visited as a child and had painted both before World War I and again, as a background, in 1934 and 1935. He now painted a series of imaginative works of the Clumps under different aspects of the Moon. Paintings such as Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (1943) and Landscape of the Moon's Last Phase (1944) show a mystical landscape rich in the symbolism of the changing seasons and of death and rebirth.<ref name=Room6>{{cite web |author=Tate|url=http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/paul-nash/paul-nash-modern-artist-ancient-landscape-room-guide-6|title=Paul Nash:Modern artist, ancient landscape:Room guide: The Wittenham Clumps|access-date=7 August 2014|work=Tate}}</ref> Another place in South Oxfordshire that Nash visited and revisited and found inspirational in his study of the Moon was the hamlet of Ascott. There he begun in 1932 and completed in 1942 his painting Pillar and Moon, which explored "the mystical association of two objects which inhabit different elements and have no apparent relation in life...the pale stone sphere on top of a ruined pillar faces its counterpart the moon, cold and pale and solid as stone". The completion of Battle of Germany in September 1944 brought Nash's public commitments to an end and