Sir William Nicholson 1872-1949

Glasgow, 1930 (details untraced);
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings by Philip Connard, Paul-Elie Genoz, William Nicholson and S.J. Peploe, 1930, no.22;
Tokyo, British Embassy, British Artist's Exhibition, 1931;
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by William Nicholson, 1933, no. 76.

Painted circa 1930.

During the period from 1923, when Nicholson and his wife Edith made the happy move from London to Sutton Veny in Wiltshire, and their separation ten years later, Nicholson concentrated heavily on painting cut flowers displayed in a variety of jugs or vases, a series of works that Lillian Browse has called ‘the most delightful flower pictures ever painted by an English artist’ (Lillian Browse, William Nicholson, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1956, p.24-5). Of the series, Daffodils stands out not only in terms of its painterly qualities – the spontaneous, paint-laden brushstrokes that make up the flowers themselves and the remarkably fluid feeling for surface texture – but also because of the fresh, sunny luminescence in which the picture is bathed. As much as any other example of Nicholson’s flower still lifes, he further succeeds in realising ‘that fleeting evanescent quality of flowers which alone can give such subjects a life of their own and avoid their being just splendid decorations’ (ibid.) Even in the earliest pre-1920 still life subjects, many of which had an almost Dutch seventeenth-century feel to them, Nicholson liked to set himself challenges, selecting objects with a tricky variety of properties and textures. In Daffodils he has honed these skills to particular effect in the rendering of the vase and the play of the reflections upon its cool, steely surface. Compositionally, these reflections underpin the success of the entire painting. It is interesting to note that in the original state, the artist had painted one stiff daffodil leaf emerging vertically from the centre of the bunch. At a later date, he painted this out, perhaps finding that in combination with the dark reflections in the vase, the vertical axis had become too strongly emphasised. With the removal of the leaf, he also deleted his original signature, which notably lay diagonally along the other dominant axis – the line of the windowsill – and replaced it instead with the single unobtrusive initial.

Belonging to a small group of slightly larger canvases painted during this time, Daffodils has been in the same private collection for at least fifty years.

We are grateful to Patricia Reed for her assistance in cataloguing this lot and lot 5.