Master of invention

The very fact that this exhibition’s subtitle has to explain who Nicholson is stands as a blatant admission of his supposed obscurity. The Academy is surely faint-hearted here — does it underestimate the intelligence of its audience? How many visitors might, without benefit of subtitle, have naturally assumed that Nicholson was an Iranian swordsmith? I have no doubt that a good percentage of the Academy’s core support group will be acquainted with Nicholson’s work or with his secondary role as father of the more-famous Ben. After all, people become Friends of the RA because they’re interested in art, and have some knowledge of that world. As for the rest of the gallery-going public, listings captions and reviews are there to inform them that William Nicholson was indeed a notable British painter and printmaker. To put these facts in the title of an exhibition to be proud of (which this is) sounds an unwelcome note of defeat before the hordes are past the ticket office.

And this is wrong, for Nicholson is a very good painter indeed, an artist who has suffered because he doesn’t fit neatly into the historians’ linear interpretation of ‘modernism’, and who operated with great skill as an independent. He began as a graphic artist of considerable enterprise and talent, teaming up with his brother-in-law James Pryde to form the internationally renowned partnership of the Beggarstaff Brothers. But he soon returned to his first love, painting, and sought to make his living and his name as a portrait painter. This he did, being knighted for his achievement. But his interests also extended to less formal subjects, such as still-life and landscape, and it was in these genres that he really excelled in originality and inventiveness. Like Sargent, he loved to paint reflected light, but he did so with sensuous precision and honesty, not with the meretricious flurry of Sargent’s slickness.