Ben Nicholson

Sale, Sotheby's London, 6 July 1960, lot 54

Sir Antony and Lady Hornby by 1963, and thence by descent to the present owners

London, Tate Gallery, Private Views, Works from the Collections of Twenty Friends of the Tate Gallery, 1963, no. 82

The genre of table-top still lifes occupied a central position in Ben Nicholson’s practice from his earliest work in the 1920s through the 1940s when he created June 7-49 (Still Life with Cornish Landscape). Having relocated to the relative safety of Cornwall when War broke out in 1939 with his second wife Barbara Hepworth and their triplets, Nicholson’s practice, now removed from the buzz of London, encouraged a renewed sense of openness in which this genre took centre stage.

Nicholson’s still lifes call attention to two prominent influences; that from his father, Sir William Nicholson, and also the Cubism of French avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Braque. Within the present work, we see an intermingling of the two. Reflecting on his career in 1963, Nicholson spoke of how much more profound his father’s influence was upon him than his European counterparts. Quoted in the paper’s 28th April edition, the artist called attention to this, recalling how ‘I owe a lot to my father – especially to his poetic idea and to his still-life theme. That didn’t come from Cubism […] but from my father.’

Despite his generous attribution of success to his father, Nicholson’s exposure to the avant-garde movement in Paris in the 1920s arguably played as much of a significant role in his continual attention to the genre. Both the balance between line and sections of colour in his return to still-lifes during the 1940s allude to this influence of synthetic cubism upon Nicholson’s treatment of still life. In the present work, the interlocking shapes and stylised incised outlines of the mugs establish a three-dimensional sense of depth that, despite being distinctly characteristic of the artist’s style, also echo the techniques of abstraction that Picasso and Braque employed. The composition of these table-top vessels before the open window and its view out to the Cornish landscape become something of a bridging device, a path that leads from abstraction back to figuration. These features thus bring together his father’s refined style and the Cubist attention to reforming form itself, weaving together upon the board to create a distinctly individual still life masterpiece.

The present work comes from the collection of Sir Antony (1904 – 1987) and Lady Hornby (1910-1971) who, during the mid 20th century, put together one of the foremost collections of Modern Art in Britain including works by European artists such as Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Balthus alongside pictures by their British contemporaries including Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood, Stanley Spencer and L.S. Lowry. Sir Antony had been a senior partner at Cazenove and was President of Savoy Hotels Ltd. He developed a particular passion for the art of the avant-garde and his grandchildren fondly remember his apartment at Claridges where he lived for the last two decades of his life surrounded by masterworks of modern art. He had presented Renoir’s A Bather to the National Gallery, London, in 1961 and amongst other bequests, he left Braque’s Glass on a Table (1909-10) to the Tate Collection.