Sir William Nicholson

Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Miss Ailsey Lazarus
Browse and Darby, London
Acquired by the present owner circa 1992 

London, Grosvenor Gallery, International Society, 22nd Exhibition, June 1917, no.16;
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by William Nicholson, 30th June-30th July 1927, no.54; 
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by William Nicholson, 1st May-2nd June 1933, no.66. 

Lillian Browse, William Nicholson, London, Hart-Davies, 1956, no.152.

The canvas board is very slightly bowed. There are some old abrasions to the surface in the bottom left corner and some minor areas of paint shrinkage in the left and centre background of the composition otherwise in good overall condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there are some minor scattered flecks of retouching to the background and a small cluster of spots of retouching in the bottom left corner. Held in a painted and plaster gilt frame. If you have any further queries, please call the 20th Century British Art department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424.
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'...It was so full of things, painters' magic – models of ships, jugs, eighteenth-century silver, old papers, odds and ends, rubbish, canvases, paints, palettes, and fishermen's glass ball, and more jugs...'.

Winifred Nicholson commenting on Sir William's studio (1967, quoted in Andrew Nicholson, ed.,  William Nicholson painter, London 1996, p.221)

Nicholson was particularly fond of using jugs as the main focus of his still lifes. The properties of the contrasting shapes, colours, textures and motifs of different types of jugs provided endless painterly possibilites for Nicholson to show off his treatment of light, tone and form. In the present work, the fresh, vibrant tones of the stocks are paired with the similarly vivid decoration of an old staffordshire jug which both stand out in stark contrast to the rich, dark background immediately drawing references to still life subjects from the Dutch 17^th Century.

Nicholson's fascination with jugs is perhaps most cogently exemplified in his seminal large-scale masterpiece The Hundred Jugs (1916, Coll. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Indeed, although Lillian Browse originally dated the present work to 1910, Patricia Reed has suggested that a date of 1916, the same year as The Hundred Jugs, is more likely.

We are grateful to Patricia Reed for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.