Master of invention
Andrew Lambirth
William Nicholson (1872-1949): British Painter and Printmaker Royal Academy, until 23 January 2005
The very fact that this exhibition's subtitle has to explain who Nicholson is stands as a blatant admission of his supposed obscurity. The Academy is surely faint-hearted here — does it underestimate the intelligence of its audience? How many visitors might, without benefit of subtitle, have naturally assumed that Nicholson was an Iranian swordsmith? I have no doubt that a good percentage of the Academy's core support group will be acquainted with Nicholson's work or with his secondary role as father of the morefamous Ben. After all, people become Friends of the RA because they're interested in art, and have some knowledge of that world. As for the rest of the gallerygoing public, listings captions and reviews are there to inform them that William Nicholson was indeed a notable British painter and printmaker. To put these facts in the title of an exhibition to be proud of (which this is) sounds an unwelcome note of defeat before the hordes are past the ticket office.
And this is wrong, for Nicholson is a very good painter indeed, an artist who has suffered because he doesn't fit neatly into the historians' linear interpretation of 'modernism', and who operated with great skill as an independent. He began as a graphic artist of considerable enterprise and talent, teaming up with his brother-inlaw James Pryde to form the internationally renowned partnership of the Beggarstaff Brothers. But he soon returned to his first love, painting, and sought to make his living and his name as a portrait painter. This he did, being knighted for his achievement. But his interests also extended to less formal subjects, such as still-life and landscape, and it was in these genres that he really excelled in originality and inventiveness. Like Sargent, he loved to paint reflected light, but he did so with sensuous precision and honesty, not with the mere tricious flurry of Sargent's slickness. Nicholson is a pure painter, and few could handle the range of marks he could command, from impasto to the lightest staining of the canvas. in addition, he composed his work brilliantly.
On the day I visited the Academy's show, laid out to stirring effect in the Sackler Galleries, the turnstiles were doing brisk business. In the first room, to the left, is a good selection of Nicholson's early prints, including his entire 'Alphabet' series double-banked on either side of the vast and surprisingly monumental Beggarstaff Brothers' poster design 'Don Quixote', a superb bit of cut-and-paste. (Their technique was of broad collage, cutting out black and brown paper and pasting it on to white. The interplay of positive and negative space, line and volume, is simply masterly.) The hand-coloured 'Alphabet' woodcuts are equally effective on a smaller scale. Just look, for instance, at `11 for Publican', depicting a big-bellied irascible beer-master, his surtout bursting its buttons, a long length of clay pipe clutched in his hand like a knobkerrie. In a nearby display case are a couple of the actual boxwood blocks used to print with and a portfolio of sporting images.
This first room also contains examples of Nicholson's early painting, thus reversing the usual flow of Sackler exhibitions, which is to move through into the second room at this point. Stay in room one for some lovely still-lifes and landscapes, as well as such piquant oddities as 'Flamingos' of 1891, a surprisingly subtle and sophisticated composition, but perhaps rendered thus when repainted in the 1930s. A whole run of beautiful paintings is grouped around the famous 'Lowestoft Bowl' of 1911 (borrowed from the Tate), making it the centrepiece of four of those quiet, informal landscapes of Nicholson's that take more looking at than you'd expect before they yield their full quota of magic. Particularly fine are 'Near Littlehampton' (1906) and 'Eclipse of the Sun, near Rottingdean' (1912). It's good to learn that so many of these paintings come from private collections, where they are doubtless cherished, hut this does help to explain why Nicholson is less well-known than he might be. Apart from such single glorious examples as 'The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas', usually in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, little is on public display. This luscious image hangs here next to the daring 'Cliff Top, Rottingdean, by Moonlight', just to show you what Nicholson is capable of in these small paintings.
For the size of most of his boards or canvases is intimate rather than awe-inspiring, though the sense of scale he achieves via these modest means is often remarkable. Space stretches away over the Downs almost illimitably, fixed only by a figure, animal or other marker included to stabilise the composition. In the crossing gallery at the end of the first room we are faced with one of the exceptions: 'The Canadian Headquarters Staff (1917-19), borrowed from the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, in Ottawa. This huge canvas features half-a-dozen sketchily painted officers in front of a highly worked aerial photograph of Ypres, where the Canadians were decisively involved in the battle of 1915. At right-angles to this strange, disquieting image is the impressive and oddly mysterious 'Armistice Night', while next to that is 'Ballroom in an Air Raid'. What a very different mood is to be found in this corner of the exhibition. Instead of Nicholson's usual detachment we have what almost amounts to hard comment.
There's a good selection of portraits in this gallery, from the large and faintly hieratic depiction of Walter Greaves (like the portrait of a disappointed gambling man), to the sensitive delineation of literary critic and historian George Saintsbury, to the imposing façade of the great garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. These potent images are interspersed with gorgeous still-lifes such as 'The Silver Casket', 'Stocks and Silver' and 'Zinnias in a Glass Vase'. Who can paint reflected light like this, or catch the true rich colour of flowers? Those who denigrate Nicholson as too English a painter are misinformed. He is a European at heart, painting in the great tradition of Velazquez and Manet (note the use of black), using a far bolder palette and more daring tonal effects than those to be expected of most contemporary English painters. (Sickert, of course, was an exception, but then he was another European.)
In the last room of the exhibition, the landscapes just get better and better. Here is Nicholson devoting his time to his real loves: flowers, jugs and the countryside, and the light effects to be obtained from painting them. Two tremendous winter scenes in particular hold the eye: 'Snow in the Horseshoe' — so radically simplified as to be almost abstract — and `Scratchbury in Snow'. A third, more formal scene, but no less effective, is 'Snow at Bretton Park'. Among the finest still-lifes are 'The Gold Jug', 'Begonias', with its poignant stick of red sealing wax, and the lovely informal late drawing in oil and chalk on board, 'Christmas Roses' (1942). Two Spanish scenes from the mid-1930s reveal a warmer palette, but a no less distinguished sense of the particular — `Andalucian Homestead' and the inspired, soaring viewpoint of 'Plaza de Toros, Malaga'. It is this precision in the face of his apparently broad handling that is so breathtaking, and makes William Nicholson much more than the minor master he's always been taken to be.
A new biography of William Nicholson by Sanford Schwartz, the curator of the RA's exhibition and contributor to the RA's own catalogue (£19.95 ph), is published by Yale at £35. Schwartz's book is the first full critical biography of the artist and will shake many of the preconceptions about him. Unfortunately, its large array of illustrations are mostly the size of postage stamps, so it is best consulted in tandem with the RA's lavishly illustrated catalogue.
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