Ben Nicholson, O.M.

Sale, Christie's London, 9th March 1984, lot 290
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owners, 1st June 1984

London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Ben Nicholson and Two Wives, Winifred Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, March - May 1996.

Original canvas.There are some areas of paint separation to the dark green pigment of the trees by the centre of the left and right edges and some further minor areas to the dark pigments in the bottom left quadrant and along the bottom edge. There is a feint vertical line in the bottom right corner where the canvas has been imprinted whilst wet. Otherwise in excellent original condition with strong passages of impasto notably in the sky and to the house in the centre of the composition. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a painted plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Ben and Winifred Nicholson acquired Banks Head, a stone-built farmhouse on the remains of a Roman mile-castle on Hadrian's Wall in the winter of 1923, and after some initial work to the fabric had been done, they took up residence the following spring. In a wild and isolated landscape to which Winifred's family had long association, the forms, colours and ever-changing light conditions provided both painters with inspiration, as well as their friends who stayed and painted there, notably Ivon Hitchens, Paul Nash and Christopher Wood.

Of these, the relationship with Wood was of particular significance, and the work of all three artists during 1927 and 1928 shows how closely they were influencing each other. For Wood, used to the sophistication of the Parisian avant-garde, the periods spent at Banks Head were hugely important and his approach to landscape painting with an aim of capturing the immediacy of the world around him was exactly in tune with the Nicholsons' own aims.

The rejection of a formal technical manner is clear in all their work of the period, and a comparison of The Swaites with a painting such as Wood's Still Life, Banks Head 1928 (Private Collection) shows how similar was their treatment of the subject. Nicholson's paintings tend to have more variation in the paint handling than Wood's, and here the contrast between the thinly brushed elements of the foreground and sky and the thick whites and creams of the house and clouds is most marked. Wood's visit to Banks Head in March 1928 seems to have been particularly important for all three, and the dusting of green in the trees suggests that The Swaites may well date from that same period. The schematic treatment of features such as animals and trees makes for a freshness of vision that is remarkable, and was subsequently to be affirmed when later in that year, Nicholson and Wood 'discovered' the retired semi-literate mariner, Alfred Wallis, on a visit to St Ives. Wallis' 'primitivism', the combination of a lifetime of experience and no formal artistic training, resulted in works which exhibited exactly the kind of immediacy which Wood and the Nicholsons were trying to achieve and thus his example seemed to bolster their own efforts and provide a beacon to others within the modernist British art circles.

Relevant information about The Swaites can be found in Judith Collins et al., A Painters' Place: Banks Head, Cumberland 1924-31, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal 1991, p.24.