The little master
One-hundred-and-fifty years after the painter’s birth, Jack Watkins considers the artistic endeavours of Sir William Nicholson, best known as the father of abstract artist Ben Nicholson, but whose work displays a satisfying warmth, mastery of technique and an old-school, painterly finish
MANY in number are the sons and daughters operating in the creative and performing arts whose names have been overshadowed by that of an illustrious parent. With Sir William and Ben Nicholson, however, the standings are reversed. Open any general dictionary of art and the entry on Ben is certain to be at least twice the length of the one devoted to his father. Where Nicholson Jnr has been described as ‘the only English painter to develop a pure abstract art of international quality between the two World Wars’, Sir William is seen as a minor player.
Aligned to no particular school, with no expressed interest in changing the direction of modern art, at best he was ‘the little master’ who ‘lacked that ruthlessness that is usually considered to be an appurtenance of genius’, according to Lillian Browse, organiser of a retrospective at the National Gallery in 1942. Even the knighthood, bestowed in 1936, sat uneasily upon his shoulders and he eventually chose to ignore it entirely, wrote Browse.
Ben said his father ‘merely wanted to paint’ and to let his pictures speak for themselves. They certainly were dramatically uneventful and untroubled, executed in the manner of someone who ‘betrayed little awareness of Matisse, Picasso, or, really, any of the transformations of art in the twentieth century’, as Sanford Schwartz, one of his more recent champions, has written. Yet, they also display a satisfying warmth, a mastery of technique and an old-school, painterly finish. They are not introspective, concerned as Sir
His paintings are cast with a serenity and ease of touch that seems reflective of the personality of their creator
William was with representing the surface appearance of his subjects, but they are cast with a serenity and ease of touch that seems reflective of the personality of their creator.
Born in Newark-on-trent, Nottinghamshire, in 1872, the son of a successful Midlands industrialist, the artist’s urge to draw and paint was there from childhood: the young man trained at Hubert von Herkomer’s art school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and at the Académie Julian in Paris in the 1890s. This was an exciting period in French art, yet the likes of Gauguin, Bonnard and other finde-siècle pacesetters seem to have washed over him. Rather, Sir William’s influences
were the 17th-century Spanish Old Masters, including Velázquez, and more recent talents, such as James Whistler and Édouard Manet.
However, when he returned to England, one of his first forays as a professional artist was into the still-developing world of poster art, as one half of J. & W. Beggar-staff, an innovative poster-designing partnership Sir William formed with his brother-in-law James Pryde in 1894. The posters were notable for their boldness and simplicity of line, bearing comparison with the best of the poster art being created in Continental Europe at the time.
Unfortunately, they struggled to attract business, so Sir William switched his attention to woodcuts. His first was a hand-coloured woodcut of Persimmon, the Prince of Wales-owned winner of the Derby and the St Leger in 1896. However, it was his irreverent illustration of Queen Victoria walking her dog, produced to mark her Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, that caused the biggest stir, considerably advancing his public profile. ‘I have yet to be shown a painting of Her Majesty more worthy of a place in our National Portrait Gallery than this little colour print,’ claimed a delighted Daily Mail correspondent.
It was portraiture that provided the artist with sufficient income to sustain a career and a comfortable lifestyle. Among the finest is Lady in Yellow, which represents the artist at his most Whistler-esque in its simplicity, composition and reduced tonal values, akin to the latter’s Portrait of My Mother. Other notable portraits include one of his friend the critic and caricaturist Max Beerbohm (the pair were ‘curiously alike in their fastidiousness, sensitivity and whimsicality’, according to Browse), the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, Society beauty Sybil-hart Davis and writer J. M. Barrie. Sir William, who loved the theatre and the world surrounding it, was also involved with the striking scenery and costume design of the first stage production of Barrie’s Peter Pan, at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in December, 1904.
Although he painted many still lifes of high order, the understated quality of his country landscapes, streetscapes and seaside scenes are also typical of this most unfussy of artists, invariably conveying a fine sense of space and light. In 1909, as a retreat from the drudgery of portrait painting, in the pursuit of which he described facing ‘relays of sitters every
His landscapes and seaside scenes convey a fine sense of space and light
twenty minutes’, he bought an old vicarage in Rottingdean, East Sussex. The artist was already familiar with the downland village through his friendship with former resident Rudyard Kipling, who wrote works such as Kim there, before moving further inland to Burwash in the same county. (He painted Kipling’s portrait at Rottingdean in 1897.) Here, Sir William would, in his own words, establish himself as ‘the painter of the Downs’, churning out many vignettes of South Downs settings, such as Sunset and Judd’s Farm, an isolated clifftop farm. In 1912, he wrote of spending two days riding over the hills, which had left him ‘almost too happy and stiff to paint’.
The artist’s landscapes weren’t restricted to Sussex. The Hill above Harlech was painted at the end of the First World War, when he lived in North Wales. Plaza de Toros, Malaga and images of Seville, which contain a raw, paredback feel for the essentials of the scene, arose from a later sojourn in southern Spain.
Something of a dandy, sporting spotted shirts, canary-yellow waistcoats, dressing gowns and white trousers, Sir William was especially at ease among writers, numbering Compton Mackenzie, Arnold Bennett and W. H. Davies as friends. He also became a painting mentor to Sir Winston Churchill after completing a portrait of the future Prime Minister and Clementine in 1934, becoming a frequent visitor to Chartwell. Sir William described him as his ‘most ardent pupil’. Churchill, in turn, thought his mentor was ‘the person who taught me most about painting’.
In 1939, the artist suffered a stroke and, although he partially recovered, he painted little for the last few years of his life. He died in 1949. Despite the pair having a strained relationship, Ben once referred to the universality of his father’s still-life and landscape paintings. These, he said, made Sir William ‘a finer painter than any other British painter of his generation, except perhaps Sickert’.