Winifred Nicholson by Christopher Andreae

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 colors 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 This exciting book, which draws on Winifred’s extensive correspondence and reproduces many previously unpublished paintings, offers a fresh and rounded view of Winifred Nicholson’s life and art.