Notes

The present lot illustrates Winifred Nicholson’s developed personal Impressionist style with her distinctive use of colour and light. She favoured flowers, often combining them with landscapes viewed through windows. In Window, she seems to draw the eye across a wistful landscape towards a building with two windows. The landscape is rendered in gentle hues of brown with flecks of white, yellow, and turquoise that capture the light. Linear twiglike trees with glinting soft green foliage point towards the windows of the building painted in swathes of mauve-tinged greys.

Nicholson, a British painter and colourist, was born in Oxford, England. She learned to paint from her grandfather, George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, who was a painter and politician and had friendships with Pre- Raphaelite artists such as William Morris and Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In 1912, Nicholson enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art and by 1914 she was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. In 1920, she married the artist Ben Nicholson, and they enjoyed a mutually beneficial artistic influence on each other.

For a decade (1925 to 1935), she participated in the Seven and Five Society, alongside her husband and other artists including Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, John Piper, and Barbara Hepworth. After her separation from Ben in 1932, Nicholson moved to Paris, where she connected with influential artists like Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. She returned to the UK in 1938, but continued to travel worldwide after World War II, often with her daughter Kate, who also became an artist. Nicholson’s artistic subjects included landscapes, still lifes, and, most notably, flowers. In 1969, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, UK held a retrospective of Nicholson’s work and a posthumous retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery in London in 1987.

Provenance

Everard Read, Cape Town.

Private Collection.