William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Patricia Reed

A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail from ‘Mauve Primulas on a Table’ painted in January 1928 when the artist was in his mid-fifties. He wrote of a ‘painting orgy’ and how he suffered ‘tennis-elbow from holding my brush for 8 hours solid’. Patricia Reed’s catalogue note adds, ‘the work is a synthesis of the motifs that interested him at this moment: a tilted picture plane, textured cloth, penumbrated shadows, a cropped bowl and a pair of open scissors’. It is pertinent to follow with a quote from Merlin James’s introductory essay on Nicholson’s ‘Painting and Experience’, that ‘the simpler his images appear, the more complex and ambiguous they turn out to be’, and this applies to his portraits and landscapes as well as to the still lifes.

William Nicholson, or WN as he is throughout the catalogue, was born in Newark-on-Trent in 1872. His father made agricultural machinery and became an MP, but right from the start WN was single-mindedly and independently an artist. In the 1890s he set painting aside to work on woodcuts and illustrations — being the W of J and W Beggarstaff with James Pryde, his brother-in-law — but by his 30th birthday he was a painter again.

‘His life’, Wendy Baron writes in her contextual essay, ‘had filled out in all its dimensions. He had a wife and three children. His woodcut of Queen Victoria at once achieved, to use an overworked phrase, iconic status’. His portfolios of hand-coloured woodcuts including ‘An Alphabet’ with his self-portrait for A was an Artist, were published to great acclaim, and ‘his social life included friendships and artistic collaborations with many of the defining characters of the decade’.