Nicholson, Winifred (1893–1981)

views updated

Nicholson, Winifred (1893–1981)

British painter. Name variations: painted under name Winifred Dacre, early 1930s until 1945. Born Winifred Roberts in 1893 in England; died in 1981; eldest daughter of Charles Roberts (a politician) and Cecilia (Howard) Roberts; studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London; married Ben Nicholson (a painter), in 1920 (divorced): children: Jake Nicholson; Kate Nicholson (an artist); Andrew Nicholson.

Selected works:

Mughetti (1921); Polyanthus and Cineraria (1921); Cyclamen and Primula (c. 1922); Fire and Water (1927); Ben and Jake (1927); Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight (1931–32); Paris Light (c. 1933–34); Blue Heptagons (1935); Outward (1936); Honeysuckle and Sweetpeas (1950); Isle of Canna (1951); Mrs. Campbell's Room of 1951 (1951); Live Pewter (1959); Copper and Capari (1967); Night and Day (1970s); Accord (1978); Prismatic Five (1979); The Gate to the Isles (1980).

Classified as a painter of flowers and acclaimed for the color and luminosity of her works, British artist Winifred Nicholson was well known in London art circles from the mid-1920s until the start of the Second World War, a period that coincided with her marriage to artist Ben Nicholson. During that time, she had four large solo exhibitions in commercial London galleries and sold the greatest number of her works. After her husband left her to live with Barbara Hepworth , Nicholson's popularity began to decline, although she was financially and artistically secure and apparently had no need of public approbation. There was a period of renewed interest in the artist in the mid-1970s, when a few of the pioneering abstract paintings she did in Paris during the 1930s resurfaced, but it was not until 1987, six years after her death, that the Tate Gallery in London mounted a major retrospective of her work.

Winifred Nicholson was born in 1893 into wealth and privilege; her mother Cecilia Howard Roberts , an amateur artist, was a member of the aristocratic Howard family which owned areas of land in Yorkshire and Cumbria. Nicholson was raised in the family's luxurious country homes, and received her early art training from her grandfather George Howard, 9th earl of Carlisle, who instructed her in the Pre-Raphaelite mode of drawing and painting directly from nature. From an early age, Nicholson was both fascinated and inspired by flowers because of their vast range of colors. Later, she would construct her flower paintings not by form, but by color harmonies. As a young woman, Nicholson studied under John Byam Shaw in London, immersing herself in his technique of sharply delineated details and symbolism. At the age of 26, she traveled with her father Charles Roberts to India, where she was strongly influenced by the intense light and distinctive colors around her. The experience helped liberate her style from the confines of her art-school training into something more bold and individualistic.

In 1918, Winifred met Ben Nicholson, a young painter who was still unsure about making art his career. Having already committed herself to painting, she served as an impressive model for him, and the two fell in love and married in 1920. They divided their time between London and the Villa Capriccio, a house perched on a hillside overlooking Lake Lugano in Switzerland that was purchased for them by Winifred's father. After 1924, Winifred acquired a farmhouse in Cumbria, where she lived off and on until her death. While Ben pursued his painting

with a professional fervor, Nicholson combined her artwork with the domestic duties that fell her way. Although she kept studios at her various residences, she often painted atop the kitchen table or used the back of a chair as an easel. Some of her early paintings are of the farmhouse's open fireplace with its adjoining oven, a frequent outpost since the house had neither gas nor electricity. When children came along, and there were three, Nicholson often used them as the subjects of her paintings. She found painting and motherhood complementary, although not always easy to reconcile. "She wrote about 'life' and 'art' sometimes pulling in different directions," explain Teresa Grimes, Judith Collins , and Oriana Baddely in Five Women Painters, "but if you can achieve a harmony between them, 'the two dragons become friends and helpmates.'"

A painting titled Mughetti (1921) is representative of Nicholson's early flower paintings. It depicts a pot containing lily of the valley given to her by her husband, still wrapped in white tissue paper from the florist. She viewed this work as a "coming-of-age" painting and considered it one of her best. It personified the emotion of love for her, because of the way the paper enfolds the flowers. "The idea of marriage I had when we married is expressed in Mughetti," the artist recalled. "I remember thinking of it while I painted. Love and the secret lovely things that it unfolds." She used the idea again in Polyanthus and Cineraria (1921), this time showing two flowering plants in their paper wrappers.

When Nicholson exhibited 27 of her paintings in May 1923, she was credited by critic Frank Rutter as having inventing a new kind of flowerpiece, in which the flowers in a vase or jar appear in front of an extensive landscape, with the middle ground excluded. Nicholson employed this technique to explore the relationship between the small, live plants, and the larger horizons of their environment. Another critic, Christopher Neve, expands on Nicholson's innovative style:

Often her most memorable paintings include tender, budding flowers in the foreground with a luminous depth beyond, culminating in a rhythmic horizon of fells. Her subject became flowers and space, the flowers like sparks of pure colour against a mysterious radiance in which the eye is free to focus back and forth.

One of Nicholson's most popular flower paintings, Honeysuckle and Sweetpeas (c. 1945–46), has been part of the Aberdeen Art Gallery since 1950. Like Mughetti, it is an emotionally charged painting, highly colorful in hues of yellow complemented by Nicholson's favorite tint of violet. The authors of Five Women Painters call this work "a marvellous example of Winifred Nicholson's ability to create luminosity; it is not just a representation of two vases containing flowers but also a magical picture that seems to emit both light and colour. It has a radiant quality which is characteristic of Winifred Nicholson's work in general."

In 1933, following her separation from her husband, Nicholson took the children and went to live in Paris, renting a third-floor flat overlooking the Seine. For five years, she mingled with the important artists working in the city at the time—Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Cézar Domela, Jean Helion, Naum Gabo, and Alberto Giacometti. She did a great deal of experimenting with color, shape, and light at the time, although she did not share these works with the public. "These were years of inspiration," she later wrote, "fizzing like a soda water bottle.… Boundaries and barriers were broken down.… We talked in the cafés of the new vision, the new scale of music, the new architecture—unnecessary things were to be done away with and art was to be functional." Nicholson held firmly to the belief that her work should be "functional," in that she liked her paintings to be viewed in a domestic setting. Two of her favorite exhibition spaces were Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge, and the LYC Gallery in Brampton, Cumbria, both created in old houses where the curators were in residence.

For the most part, Nicholson's lifestyle belied her background. Money was important only if there were a pressing need (a school tuition bill, for example), and then she might scurry to sell a painting. Otherwise, she lived simply with few luxuries; she made all her own and her children's clothing, which led her to a lifelong interest in fabrics. Her approach to painting was pragmatic as well. "You set out your colours and you start to paint and you don't stop until you've finished," she once replied when asked how she approached a work. She painted fast, usually completing a painting in one sitting, and if she wasn't pleased she turned the canvas over and started again. Many of her paintings are worked on both sides of the canvas; some were reprimed so that one painting covers another.

In one of her first Paris paintings, Paris Light (c. 1933–34), Nicholson experimented with reflected light and prismatic color, subjects that continued to fascinate her throughout her career. In her quest to discover different qualities of light and ranges of color, she traveled a great deal, making pilgrimages to the remote Scottish islands of South Uist, Skye, Canna, Rhum, and Eigg, and journeying to Greece and North Africa in 1960, with her daughter Kate, also an artist. At age 82, Nicholson purchased two small glass prisms ("portable rainbow machines," she called them), and created a series of pictures by holding them in front of her subject. In the last few months of her life, she corresponded with a research physicist, discussing with him the subjects of light and color. In one of her last letters to him, she likened the liberating quality of color to that of love. "And so all paradoxes can be surmounted by Love or shall we say colour. Is that why my heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."

In 1979, Nicholson had begun preparing a book about color theory which she planned to call The Scale of the Rainbow. Since she did not complete the work before her death, her son Andrew compiled a posthumous collection of her writings and paintings under the title Unknown Colour.