Luminosity, open space and quick movements characterise Winifred Nicholson's paintings. Flowers on windowsills are a favourite subject, not only for their intrinsic beauty, or even their personalities, but above all for their living, translucent colour. The ways in which light divides into atmospheric rainbow colours was a matter of childlike wonder to her throughout her long career.
This book shows Winifred Nicholson as much more than a 'flower painter'. She managed an unusually creative balance between motherhood and painting, her children becoming subjects – as did her husband, the artist Ben Nicholson. Too often given a cursory mention as his first wife, Winifred warrants independent recognition for the striking originality of her own work.
Born in 1893 into the aristocratic Howard family, Winifred Nicholson, experimenting alongside Ben Nicholson, emerged as a ground-breaking painter in the 1920s. In 1930s Paris she investigated abstraction. After the Second World War she continued to paint the world immediately around her – in her native Cumberland and on many painting trips. She painted Greek landscapes as settings for imagined Greek myths. Love of sunlight was joined by a sensitive affection for moonlight. In her final decade she discovered, by using prisms, ways of interweaving the abstractness of spectrum colours with the reality of flower and landscape.
This exciting book, which draws on Winifred's extensive correspondence and reproduces many previously unpublished paintings, offers a fresh and rounded view of Winifred Nicholson's life and art.
Contents: Chronology; Introduction; Childhood Beginnings, 1893-1911; Art School/Passage to India 1912-20; A Painter Man, 1920-23; Moves, 1923-5; Growing Recognition, 1926-8; Relationships, 1929-31; Paris, 1932-7; Return, 1938-50; More Firsts, 1951-66; Explorations, 1967-81; Postscript; Notes; Public Collections; Bibliography; Index; Acknowledgements; Picture Credits.
About the Author: Christopher Andreae has written about art since the early 1960s. He is the author of Mary Newcomb (Lund Humphries 1996; revised reprint 2007), Mary Fedden (Lund Humphries 2007) and A Word or Two, a collection of essays published in 2004.
Reviews: 'This is a much-needed book. Winifred Nicholson is now appreciated as a very individual and import and 20th-century artist. Christopher Andreae offers a subtle interpretation of her life and work that allows her wonderful paintings to speak for themselves.' Cumberland News
'Together, exhibition and book bring out the strength, originality and fecundity of her art as never before.' Frances Spalding
'Winifred Nicholson is often overshadowed by the ambitious and radical modernism of her husband Ben ... A handsome new monograph by Christopher Andreae should help correct this imbalance and reveal Winifred as the true original she has always been.' Andrew Lambirth, The Spectator 2009
'This monograph on Winifred Nicholson's art is a joy to look at. The sensitive reproductions of over 200 pictures do full justice to the favoured themes of an artist who expressed herself in colour and light captured in air. Fittingly, the book's author is Christopher Andreae, who knew Winifred Nicholson well from the 1960s, and whose sympathetic text balances his artist's eye with that of the art historian'. Art Quarterly Autumn 2009
'This book, largely through its excellent colour illustrations, will confirm her [Nicholson's] place within the English visionary tradition.' Frances Spalding, Literary Review July 2009
'this is a delightfully light and airy book, a pleasure to look at ... Andreae has written a refreshingly plain and readable narrative of a painting life'. The Art Newspaper November 2009
' ... a very sensitive and warm account ... with many insights into Nicholson's often mystical and mystifying character. The book reproduces in the full glorious colour they deserve many of her best works.' Arlis
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The family of Winifred Nicholson has created a website dedicated to her art
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