Winifred Nicholson

The Artist
Private Collection
Sale, Phillips London, 21 November 1995, lot 53
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
Private Collection

Original canvas, there is a landscape of St Ives Harbour on the reverse. There are some very light stretcher bar marks and some minor old surface scratches along the bottom right edge otherwise in good overall condition. Under ultraviolet light, there are some scattered spots and areas of retouching to the white waves in the bottom half of the composition and some further scattered spots of retouchings to the clouds throughout the sky. Large areas of the upper right quadrant flouresce however, these appear to be the hand of the artist and the nature of the pigments used. Held in a painted white frame.
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There is a landscape of St Ives harbour on the verso.

Nicholson aptly concluded in her foreword to Christopher Wood's 1979 retrospective that, '...all English people like the sea' (Winifred Nicholson, 'Foreword', Christopher Wood, exh.cat., Arts Council of Great Britain 1979, p.6). Whilst better known for her brightly coloured still lifes, the vitality and energy imbued in the brushstrokes and intense colours of both recto and verso of the present work clearly demonstrate her affinity with the subject. Significantly, the energetic stormy atmosphere of the recto depicts the coast by Feock near Truro in Cornwall whilst the verso is St Ives and the present work was almost certainly executed in 1928 when Ben and Winifred Nicholson holidayed in Cornwall from July - October, staying first in Feock with Marcus and Irene Brumwell. They were later joined by Christopher Wood in September and October and the handling of the present work is highly reminiscent of Wood's own cornish subjects from the same period such as A Cornish Window (1928, Private Collection) and A Fisherman's Farewell (1928, Private Collection).

Importantly, it was during this summer of 1928 that the Nicholsons and Wood first came across the untaught mariner, Alfred Wallis, in St Ives.  Wallis's fresh seascapes depicting boats along the St Ives coast using household paint on whatever materials he could find, inspired all three artists to re-visit the theme of the seascape using a more simplistic pictorial language. It is not inconceivable to suggest that Nicholson was influenced in her painting of the present work after seeing Wallis's strikingly naive visual vocabulary (see lots 1 and 49 - 51).