On William Nicholson

Katherine Mansfield’s​ short story ‘Bliss’ is a jewel-like study of a young woman, Bertha, poised unknowingly at a moment of crisis in her life. (It’s interesting not least for what it prefigures of Mrs Dalloway.) Bertha, preparing for a dinner party she will give that evening, arranges the fruit she has ordered: tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones’, the latter chosen deliberately ‘to tone in with the new dining room carpet’. This last thought, she reflects, is a little ‘far-fetched’, but when she has finished the arrangement and stands back something ‘most curious’ happens. ‘The dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air.’ The effect was ‘so incredibly beautiful … She began to laugh.’ It is that same curious beauty – poise without tension, a scene both miniature and universal – that makes you gasp in front of William Nicholson’s near contemporary still lifes The Silver Casket (1919) and The Silver Casket and Red Leather Box (1920), two paintings that quietly dominate the thoughtful exploration of his life and work currently on display at Pallant House (until 10 May).

‘The Silver Casket and Red Leather Box’ (1920)

Today Nicholson is more known about than known. Some works – his child unfriendly Alphabet (B is for Beggar, U is for Urchin), the illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit and the portrait of him in his favourite spotted dressing gown by William Orpen – strike chords of recognition, as does his first commercial success, the coloured woodcut of Queen Victoria with walking cane and Skye terrier. It was made for her Diamond Jubilee, though William Heinemann, who eventually published it, initially objected that Victoria, dome-shaped in black with a white feathered bonnet, looked like a tea cosy. By 1897 the ‘Good Queen and Empress’, a fixture in the mind’s eye of three generations, did look like a tea cosy and was as reassuringly familiar. The print struck the balance between respect and satire, pleasing the general public as well as the 1890s avant-garde. Oscar Wilde put it on his wall (‘Every poet should gaze at the portrait of his queen’) and when Nicholson modestly responded to praise from Whistler by remarking that the queen was a wonderful subject, Whistler replied: ‘Her Majesty might well say the same of you.’ Printmaker, portraitist, landscape artist, theatre designer and illustrator, Nicholson slips through the fingers of art historians. Neither Bloomsbury nor Post-Impressionist, Aesthetic nor Arts and Crafts, though something of all of these, he was also the father of the more easily categorised modernist, Ben Nicholson. The current exhibition, the first on such a scale for twenty years, explores the Venn diagram of his career with the astonishing still lifes at its intersecting centre.

William Nicholson was born in 1872 in Newark-on-Trent. The son of a moderately prosperous engineer and his second wife, he seems never to have wanted to do anything except paint, draw and live on his own terms. His parents let him drop out of grammar school at sixteen and he joined the art college-cum-artists’ colony run by the painter Hubert von Herkomer at Bushey, just north of London. Three years later he was asked to leave, having posed a nude model with an open umbrella, an intervention regarded by Herkomer as a piece of ‘Whistlerian impudence’. Whistler himself still lay ahead. In the meantime, Nicholson left England to study at the Académie Julian in Paris.

The legacy of the years at Bushey was his encounter with two fellow students, the brother and sister James and Mabel Pryde. Having eloped with Mabel, Nicholson went into artistic partnership with James under the soubriquet of the Beggarstaffs, an old English name which they had noticed on a fodder sack in a stable and liked. The Prydes and their friends, including the actress Ellen Terry and her son, the theatre director and designer Edward Gordon Craig, set the course for much that followed. Although the Beggarstaffs partnership was short-lived, it established Pryde and Nicholson as original poster artists of international stature, comparable to Toulouse-Lautrec.

The exhibition opens with their designs for the Drury Lane Cinderella and a poster from 1894 for Hamlet. Pared down until he occupies only a third of the narrow format, the Prince of Denmark appears side-on contemplating Yorick’s skull, bone white against Hamlet’s black-robed profile, the pointy toes of his slippers, the high-collared cape and headdress giving him an unmistakeably Aesthetic silhouette. Like the tea-cosy queen, the design shows Nicholson’s grasp of what Whistler called ‘the art of leaving out’. Recognition depends less on what the eye sees than on what the mind remembers of what it has seen. Hamlet, who more usually holds the skull in one hand, holds it here in both, gazing into the eye sockets, creating intense emotional effect in what is little more than an outline. Nicholson enjoyed the theatre and went on to design costumes for the first production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. An early portrait of Ben, from 1901, shows him standing three-quarter face in an oblong of light amid shadows, as if waiting in the wings of a theatre. As Simon Martin notices in his catalogue essay, ‘William Nicholson: The Illusionist’, Nicholson often used this effect of an isolated figure, as if spotlit on a stage, in his work.

Portraits were the reliable if exhausting source of much needed income. Neither Nicholson nor his wife had private means; the £500 a year that Woolf recommended, and which many members of the Bloomsbury set enjoyed, was not theirs. Nicholson had remarkable facility, as demonstrated by the painting of Miss Wish Wynne, Actress in the Character of Janet Cannot for the Play ‘The Great Adventure’, which he knocked out in four hours when the artist who had been commissioned to do it fell ill. Wynne is shown from the back, turning in three-quarter profile, intent and forceful, the reddish pink of her dress set off by the white cross straps of her apron. Even so, as Nicholson wrote to a potential client hoping for two pictures, ‘Nothing frightens me more than a possible queue of sitters.’ Portraits are among the best works in the exhibition, and also some of the weakest. At times it seems that their success was in inverse ratio to the eminence of the sitter.

Patricia Reed’s essay on the portraits explains that Nicholson preferred to work with a sitter directly, without preparatory studies, reworking pictures over many years, sometimes to destruction. Breakfast at Chartwell (1934-36), depicting Winston and Clementine Churchill at home, was taken back to the studio after its first exhibition to be ‘corrected’ and did not survive the ‘few minor but ultimately ruinous improvements’. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a commission for the London School of Economics, shows the couple awkwardly far apart in front of a fireplace. As their friend Bernard Shaw remarked, it is a very fine picture of brickwork. Nicholson and Lord Hardinge, viceroy of India, a man used to command and with little time to spare, did not hit it off. While he was in Delhi, Nicholson also took the time to make the magnificent, near life-size portrait of The Viceroy’s Orderly (Duffadar Valayat Shah), who is shown full length in his silvery-white official costume. Like the Morris dancer Edward Russell, a favourite model of his, Shah evidently spoke to something in Nicholson. His own children had a similar effect on him. Nancy in a Feather Hat – a painting of his daughter at the age of ten – is a joyous composition, with echoes of Whistler. Golden feathers and a blue shawl reflect light onto a face in which adolescence is beginning to dawn in the eyes of a child.

While it’s unhelpful to try to categorise Nicholson, it is useful to contextualise him. Stephen Calloway does this with deft authority in his essay ‘The Self-Fashioning of an Artist’. It’s in his milieu, the fluid fin-de-siècle of the 1890s, that Nicholson comes into focus as a personality and an artist. With Max Beerbohm, Edwin Lutyens (a close friend who was responsible for Nicholson’s trip to India), William Rothenstein, Aubrey Beardsley and William Orpen, he was one of what Julius Meier-Graefe called ‘the superboys’. These Nietzschean sports, children of the 1860s and early 1870s, including Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt and the Glaswegian ‘Spook School’, were the generation who made art and architecture remarkable across Europe in the last years of the century. Diverse as the arts and attitudes of Nicholson’s circle were, some things were shared. A playfulness, a love of quips and puns, excruciating in Lutyens’s case, and a self-conscious self-presentation.

Nicholson’s look was his own take on the ‘Masher’, a style popular with young men about town in the 1890s. The prolific illustrator Phil May, another Masher (or Nut, as they were sometimes known), drew Nicholson and James Pryde for the Studio magazine in matching Masher gear: wide coats with big pearl buttons and low-crowned bowler hats. As Pryde was tall and strongly built, and Nicholson so slight that the Prydes referred to him as ‘the kid’, the effect was fondly comic. Such self-fashioning attracts attention and at the same time deflects it. By becoming a type, the individual can avoid scrutiny and there were people who found Nicholson’s brittle ‘smart talk’ difficult to deal with. He disliked Orpen’s portrait of him with his family, although photographs show it to have been accurate. It was perhaps the implied narrative that disturbed him. The children look bored or irritable and Mabel, who stands at the back, an outline like a peg doll with one hand on the doorknob, is less distinct than the spots on her husband’s dressing gown.

Nicholson, although undoubtedly vain, was perhaps no more self-obsessed than most artists. He was fond of children, and his sense of play breaks out in his illustrations, which include such improbable scenes as The Serpent and Her Mother (1923), in which a young adder is seen trying on a bonnet in a mirror. The same sense of whimsy is evident in his work for children’s books, especially The Velveteen Rabbit. The drawings positively bubbled onto the paper according to one observer, who watched as ‘hundreds of rabbits’ were ‘drawn calligraphically without lifting the pen … in a boisterous humour full of surprise’. The impression of fully formed images straining to get out recalls Nicholson’s comment on Judd’s Farm (1912), one of the small plein air landscapes included in the show. It was, he wrote, so simple he had it fully in his mind before ‘releasing the paint’.

‘Studio Still Life’ (1914)

By 1914 the Nicholsons had four children. William had a reputation, and an important patron in Thomas W. Bacon, but the war took a heavy toll. One of the finest portraits in the show, never previously exhibited, is A Soldier of the 1914-18 War, another profile composition, masterly in its accumulation of realistic detail – the propped bayonet, the sandbags of the trench on which the soldier leans his folded arms – and in its mood of watchful, steady tension. It is thought to be a portrait of the Nicholsons’ second son, Tony, who died of his wounds the following year. Mabel died in the flu pandemic of 1918-19, which took more lives than the war itself. Nicholson made a hasty and ultimately unhappy second marriage to Edie Stuart Wortley, an eligible widow he had known for some time. The marriage did nothing to improve relations with Ben, always fretfully competitive with his father, who had hopes regarding Edie himself. The dress that Nicholson designed for his second wife, made up in painstakingly hand-painted glazed cotton, is shown here beside her portrait, in which a tactful shadow implies a slenderer figure than the dress itself suggests.

By now Nicholson had begun on the still lifes. The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas and The Lowestoft Bowl (both 1911) are two of the most beautiful. Having been commissioned before the war to create a decorative scheme for the Paris apartment of the author Edward Knoblock, Nicholson set up a studio there and painted Studio Still Life (1914). More interesting than successful, the background is a painting showing the view from the apartment towards the Palais Royal behind a collection of objects relating to Knoblock’s interests, among them his walking stick and toile de Jouy gown and cap. The composition doesn’t gel, but it points towards the development both of the still lifes and Nicholson’s synecdochic portraits, of which the most famous is Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots (1920). Nicholson painted it while waiting for dusk, when Gertrude Jekyll, refusing to waste daylight, would come indoors and sit for him.

After he and Edie separated in 1933, Nicholson fell in love with the writer Marguerite Stern, who became his companion for the rest of his life. He accepted a knighthood but declined to be put up for the Royal Academy, and although he was now chiefly known as a painter, he continued to work for the theatre, making designs for Massine’s ballet The Tub and Noël Coward’s The Marquise. Like Coward he took care to maintain his image. After the Second World War, when his favourite Edwardian-style shirts in patterned or spotted fabric were no longer available, he taught his granddaughter Jane to paint white shirts with ‘pinpoint black spots’ by hand.

The family had become a dynasty. Ben’s first marriage, to the artist Winifred Roberts, failed when he met and fell in love with Barbara Hepworth, whom he went on to marry, but Winifred Nicholson made her own reputation and seems to have remained close to her father-in-law. Nancy, herself an artist and textile designer, married Robert Graves, with whom she had four children, before that marriage also collapsed; Christopher, the youngest of the four, became an architect, a member of the Modernist MARS group and husband of the textile designer E.Q. Myers. Nicholson’s legacy is threaded throughout 20th-century British art, but his own work has been undervalued both for its variety and for the perfect pitch of his curiously breathtaking still lifes.