Winifred Nicholson

Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1981 
Private Collection, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 3rd July 2002, lot 79
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where purchased by the previous owners, 19th July 2004, and thence by descent 

London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Winifred Nicholson, Recent Paintings, 24th March - 15th April 1981 (ex. cat.);
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, British Landscape Painting in the Twentieth Century, 8th June - 31st July 2004, illustrated.

Oil on original canvas. The canvas undulates very slightly towards the right vertical edge, with a very slight line in the canvas, most probably caused by the stretcher, but otherwise appears sound. There is a small fleck of loss to the orange pigment in the lower right corner. There is some light studio detritus to the right half of the upper right horizontal edge. Subject to the above, the work appears in very good overall condition, with strong and vibrant colours. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. The work is presented in a painted wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to Jovan Nicholson for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

In the mid 1970s Winifred Nicholson embarked on a new direction in her painting using a prism to break up light and so bring a greater brightness and luminosity to her painting (see note to the previous lot). And from this time almost all her paintings can be described as ‘prismatic’ although not all depicted rainbow colours. The prism was a constant companion for her: 'My prism is in a black pocket in my purse. I can put my hand into my pocket and pull it out whenever I want to see a rainbow. For the prism shows us rainbows everywhere.' (Winifred Nicholson quoted in Andrew Nicholson, (ed.), Unknown Colour, Paintings. Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson, Faber and Faber, London, 1987, p.259).

Winifred Nicholson painted ‘prismatic’ paintings in her last trip to Greece in 1979 as well as her last visit to the Hebrides in the summer of 1980, where on the island of Eigg she made one of her best loved paintings, (for example The Gate to the Isles (Blue Gate)), and also in her native Cumbria. The importance of these works to her cannot be understated and except in a few instances she did not exhibit them until she felt ready to show them in London at the Crane Kalman Gallery in March 1981. As it turned out this exhibition of recent paintings opened only shortly after she had died and so she was never able to know how well they were received.

Now was painted at her home, Bankshead, in Cumbria, from the sunroom at the top of the house with views overlooking the Irthing river and the fells of the north Pennines behind. (The same room in which she painted First Prismatic, sold in these rooms 16^th November 2011, lot 125). Except the view is obscured and all we see is a blue misty haze with the fluid paint perhaps hinting at mist on the large windows. Two daffodils sit in a pot accompanied by sprigs of what might be forsythia with the parapet of the balcony beyond edged in a fierce red. It is characteristic of Winifred Nicholson’s love and delight in painting and of her natural ebullience and disposition to live in the present that a painting made in her late eighties should be titled Now.

Mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) and The Djanogly Art Centre, The University of Nottingham, are planning an exhibition of Winifred Nicholson’s work in the autumn of 2016. It is hoped that the purchaser will agree to lend this picture to the exhibition.

Jovan Nicholson