Winifred Nicholson's artistic voice was evident from an early stage and her technique, particularly the adoption of a muted palette, was to be hugely influential on her husband, the artist Ben Nicholson.
Born Rosa Winifred Roberts, she became a celebrated British artist known for her still-life and landscape paintings. Born in Oxford on 21st December 1893, she was taught to paint by her grandfather, George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, who counted the Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris as friends. Winifred studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London until 1919 when she travelled to Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and India with her father. On 4th November of the following year, she married the abstract artist Ben Nicholson, the eldest son of artists Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde.
The couple bought the villa Capriccio near Castagnola in Switzerland and the Bankshead farmhouse in Cumbria in north-west England, and split their time between the two countries. Together, they travelled extensively and painted prolifically. Winifred joined the Seven & Five Society in 1925 and exhibited with them frequently, before staging her first solo exhibition in 1930 at the Leicester Galleries in London. The couple divorced in 1938 upon meeting Barbara Hepworth, and Winifred continued to work and live across Europe, primarily basing herself at Bankshead.
Nicholson was inspired by French artists such as Paul Cézanne for his experiments with the application of warm and cool colours, and Henri Rousseau for his simplification and directness of form. She combined these influences to produce landscape paintings from her travels that resulted in scenes composed of bold, concentrated colours depicted in a highly impressionistic manner. Never tiring of her exploration of the genres of still life and landscape, Nicholson often hybridised the two. She developed what was to become a characteristic conceit – that of a still life arrangement on a window sill with an abruptly foreshortened view beyond.
This keen eye and technical understanding also came to bear in her relationships with prominent French Modernists of the period. Nahum Gabo, Jean Hélion, and Giacometti became friends, and Nicholson cannily purchased work by all of them. She was also the first British collector to buy a work by Mondrian, as well as accompanying the artist to Britain from Paris in 1938.
During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Nicholson spent a great deal of time in the Scottish Highlands. She frequently visited the area with the poet Kathleen Raine, a close friend, staying at a retreat at Sandaig in Ross-shire on the western coast. Inspired by the effects of light and colour created by the ever-changing weather conditions, Nicholson felt a special, profound connection to the landscape and was eager to learn its folklore, customs, and people.
