Lot 2168
‡WINIFRED NICHOLSON (1893-1981)
POPPIES
Oil on canvas
49.5 x 49.5cm.
Exhibited: London, Messrs Ernest, Brown and Phillips at The Leicester Galleries, 1930 (very faintly inscribed label on stretcher), the artist's first solo exhibition there
Provenance: Bought at the above exhibition by Lady Horlick, thence by descent
* Jane, Lady Horlick, was the daughter of Colonel Cunliffe Martin and was the first wife of Sir Ernest Burford Horlick, 2nd Bt. (1880-1934). She married secondly, in 1931, the diplomat Sir Francis Charles Oppenheimer (1870-1961)
"I like painting flowers," Nicholson once stated. "I have tried to paint many things in many different ways, but my paintbrush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower … to me they are the secret of the cosmos."
The simple format of an otherwise unadorned table top appealed greatly to Nicholson and the uncluttered layout injected her work with confidence and an effortless panache. She would work on a number of variations before settling upon a final composition, all the while showing an unerring eye for supreme balance that had drawn her to Piet Mondrian's art (a 1932 example of whose work hung in pride of place in her front kitchen at Bankshead).
Paul George Konody reviewed the exhibition in which this picture was shown and identified a subtlety in the artist's blend of form, space and colour: 'Elegance of arabesque and loveliness of colour and surface quality help towards making her pictures the gems of wall decoration which they undoubtedly are. She is not content with the two-dimensional disposition of her material, and is invariably bent upon the conquest of the third dimension, although her indication of special relations is too subtle to become immediately obvious to the spectator. The refinement of her colour harmonies baffles description.' (P.G. Konody, 'Berthe Morisot and Winifred Nicholson', Observer, 30th March 1930)
Similarly, Jim Ede, a friend of the artist and the founder of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, noted Nicholson's instinctive response to the age-old theme of still life. He admired how she interpreted the depiction of nature with an almost spiritual intensity: 'She paints a pot of flowers and in it you feel the laws of universal birth - it isn't just these flowers growing - it is the whole life of nature … She obtains a freshness in her painting, and for colour, I know of no one who interprets so truthfully the pure clarity of flowers themselves. There is about it all an ease and simplicity, an apparent effortlessness, inevitable as the moving of clouds in a blue sky; and this is because her work is a thing felt before it is seen.' (Jim Ede, quoted in Jovan Nicholson (ed.), Art and Life, Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920-1931, London, 2013, p.83).
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