Winifred Nicholson

The Artist and thence by family descent

Patrick Bourne & Co., 2023

Acquired by the present owner

London, Crane Kalman Gallery, An Unknown Aspect of Winifred Nicholson, 9 – 25 October 1975, no. 22

Banks, Li Yuan-Chia Museum, Winifred Nicholson, August 1981

Winifred Nicholson lived in Paris between 1932-8 and befriended many of the abstract artists living there. Notably she was the first British person to buy a painting by Mondrian, but also collected works by Giacometti, Gabo and Hélion, and knew Brancusi, Arp and Kandinsky. Inspired by the works she saw by these artists she turned to abstraction, writing:

“For then I had discarded all my pre-Raphaelite romance – copying the visual world of appearances – and with fond delight traced with a compass and set square proportions that leapt out of the canvas unexpected to my thought and to my eye. The work was experimental – I did not know where it would lead – but it delighted me…When I was painting these canvasses I felt in the company of star galaxies and their orbits. No light of realistic sunlight but the opposition, not Mondrian’s opposition of horizontal and vertical, but the equally potent opposition of light to darkness” An Unknown Aspect of Winifred Nicholson, Crane Kalman Gallery, 1974

At the time she only exhibited a few abstract paintings, and it was only when Norman Reid, then director of the Tate, expressed an interest and purchased Quarante-Huit, Quai d’Auteuil and Moonlight and Lamplight for the Tate, that she exhibited them, first at the Crane Kalman Gallery in 1974 and then at the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria, further explaining:

“I was living alone in Paris and all around me the art world was calculating and seeking by their calculations the basic reason for art. The primal forces that built it. They sought such a primal force in geometry; in the circle, the rectangle, the triangle, and their juxtaposition to one-another. No compromises, no wibble-wobble” Winifred Nicholson: Paintings 1930-1974, LYC Museum and Art Gallery, 1974.

Throughout Winifred Nicholson’s primary focus remained her flower painting, and even though these abstract works from the 1930s are few in number, they fully express her exuberant sense of colour and adventure. 

Jovan Nicholson