| Galleries » Modern British Paintings 1900-1950 » Winifred Nicholson |
| Winifried Nicholson (1893-1981) was a quintessentially
British painter, particularly in respect of colourful and lively figurative paintings,
mainly still lifes and landscapes. She painted in oils, watercolours, gouache and pencil,
especially flowers and landscape paintings. She was born in Oxford and studied at the Byam
Shaw School of Art in London, and as early as 1914 exhibited at the Royal Academy. She
also studied art in Paris, Lugano, India and the Hebrides. She participated in mixed
exhibitions most of her life, initially under her maiden name of Winifred Roberts. She met
Ben Nicholson in 1920, and married him in 1920. She held her first one-woman show at the
Mayor Gallery as Winifred Nicholson in 1925. She exhibited widely with Ben Nicholson and
on her own and at the the Leicester, Lefevre and Crane Kalman galleries. She was a member
of the Seven and Five Society (from 1925-1935) and the NEAC from 1937-1943. She contributed to Circle, International Survey of Constructivist Art, and in 1937, designed a "constructive" fabric for Alastair Morton's Edinburgh Weavers in the same year, as Winifred Dacre, and under the same name showed four abstract works in an Exhibition of Constructive Art at the London Gallery. She is best known for her vibrant flower paintings in Cumberland, Cornwall and the South of France. She separated from Ben Nicholson in 1931, and never remarried, preferring instead to live in Paris until 1938 and eventually retired to a solitary life with many close friends near Hadrian's Wall at Brampton, in Cumbria. She had three children, Jake, Andrew and Kate Nicholson the painter. She travelled widely until late in life, showing pictures of Greece, Morocco, Cornwall and Cumbria. Her later work was concerned with prismatic colour experiments. She is widely represented in many international public collections, including the Tate Gallery, Bristol, Bradford, Adelaide and Melbourne. . |
