Ben Nicholson, O.M. 1894-1982

Painted in 1956, a year of great success and recognition for Nicholson. In 1954 he had represented British art at the Venice Biennale and won the Ulisse award - this display was then toured to Amsterdam, Paris and Zurich. Nicholson had several one-man shows in quick succession thoughout Europe and 1955 was the year of his first Tate retrospective. In 1956 he was recipient of the Guggenheim award: first prize in the International Guggenheim Painting Competition.

Norbert Lynton summarises the Fifties as a decade in which Nicholson produced "paintings of exceptional brilliance and subtlety... in compositions blatantly governed by purely aesthetic considerations" (Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993, p.244). Still life motifs remained, but were largely subsumed by considerations of design and colour, anticipating the re-adoption of pure abstraction that came with the reliefs of the later 50s. Lynton describes how by 1955 "an even more marked sense of assertive, almost sculptural form" had entered Nicholson's work. While Nicholson continued to travel and produce beautifully fine and easily-read linear images of the places he visited, his major works were becoming tougher and harder-edged, signalling a return in sentiment to the three-dimensional severity and minimalism of the 1930s reliefs.

Lynton calls these mid-50s pieces "some of [Nicholson's] most powerful and optimistic works". Works from this group share an interest in surface interplay, utilising the flecked texture of the heavy masonite as much as the artist's own roughening and carving of the various layered supports. These oils have an immediate 'presence', with some sections barely treated and revealing the natural earth tones of the support medium itself. Colour is here in harmony with texture, as the worked surface might further resemble some natural substance such as cork, stone or wood. 1955, August (Cantabria) is one of the earliest reliefs in this style, while 1956, February (Menhir) and 1956, February (granite) suggest the elemental, natural basis of their inspiration. The 'Tregeseal' of the title here is in fact the name of a Cornish village, which lies just outside St. Just on the wind-wracked tip of the Cornish peninsular, about five miles north of Land's End. The title is thus the sole remaining clue as to the work's original inspiration.