Sir William Nicholson 1872-1949

A gift from the Artist to Rosemary ('Rosy') Gordon Craig on the occasion of her marriage to James Le Brasseur, 1917, and thence by descent to the present owner

William Nicholson's preternatural ability to bring bold visual vitality to the simplest of still-life compositions alongside minutely rendered nuances of tone and surface has been well recorded. Demonstrating, in R.Nichols' words, 'a severe and sagacious elimination of the unnecessary' (William Nicholson, Harmondsworth, 1948, p.7), Still Life with Freesias dates from the period when Nicholson's approach to still life painting was beginning to change. The objects become fewer and the arrangements simpler, the concentration moving more towards rendering the individual character of the contrasting surfaces of the forms. Sharing marked similarities with some of Nicholson's most celebrated compositions (for example Stocks and Silver, 1918, Private Collection), the present work has remained in the same family, unexhibited, since it was given as a wedding present by the artist to Rosemary Gordon Craig in 1917. This unusual gesture indicates the affection that William Nicholson felt for the daughter of his friend Edward Gordon-Craig who was the same age as his son Ben. The two families had been very friendly since the late 1890s and 'Rosy' sat for Nicholson on several occasions, most notably as the young subject of 'La Petite Marchande' (1902, Private Collection) where she is shown standing next to a table wearing a large straw hat.

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