Winifred Nicholson 1893-1981

Dame Marie Tempest (Mrs Graham Brown), 1942
Beaux Arts, London

Private Collection UK

Ben and Winifred Nicholson moved into Bankshead, Cumberland in 1924 and the farmhouse was to remain Winifred's home for the rest of her life. The fresh tones, simplified forms and wild spring Penstimons featured in the present work encapsulate the calm and quiet atmosphere that characterised life there. Christopher Wood first visited them at Bankshead in Spring 1928 and wrote to his mother describing the idyllic rural life he discovered; 'my room is lovely...all white-washed and a huge window across the end, a box bed with a pretty blue cover, a table, a row of pots of tulips and little hyacinths and outside some ducks to a little farmyard like Beatrix Potter things...' (Wood, letter dated 8th March 1928, quoted in Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood: An English Painter, London 1995, p.181). 

During Wood's 1928 visit to Bankshead, Winifred recalls that 'inspiration ran high and flew backwards and forwards from one to the other' (Nicholson, Kit, unpublished memoir, TGA 723.100, p.18). It is highly likely that the present work dates to this visit when Winifred and Wood's work was almost interchangeable and works such as Wood's Still Life, Bankshead (1928, Private Collection) could easily be mistaken as being by Winifred. Stylistically, the subtle texture and shadow of the background of the present work is very similar to the background in her portrait of Christopher Wood also painted circa 1927-1928 (Private Collection) and marks her own interpretation of Wood's technique of background 'coverine' that her husband Ben was particularly inspired by (see lot 40).

Although the subject of the present work is typical of Winifred's oeuvre, Penstimons offers a rare and innovative perspectival arrangement for Winifred. Instead of her more usual focus on the subject in the centre of a window or table in works such as Cyclamen and Primula (1922, Coll. Kettle's Yard, Cambridge) and Dusky Cranesbill (circa 1927-1928, Private Collection), the Penstimons in the present work are slightly elevated from the viewer by the mantelpiece or shelf running at a slight angle across the composition. The arrangement is strikingly similar to the challenging perspective of Vanessa Bell's Still life on Corner of a Mantelpiece (1914, Coll. Tate) and it is apt that a reviewer for The Times wrote of Winifred's work in July 1928, 'she has an uncanny sense of flowers, of what they are behind their shapes and colours, as emanations of earth, and her technical methods are right in principle for what she has to say'.