Objects of lustre

Mary Miers considers the contribution made to English art by William Nicholson (1872–1949), master of the ‘unassuming sublime’

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BEST known in his day as a pioneering printmaker and society portraitist, Sir William Nicholson ploughed an independent furrow through the artistic fields of the earlier 20th century, conforming neither to academic convention nor the methods and interests of the Continental avant-garde.

A representational artist, he was interested in the nature of painting and was happiest doing landscapes and still lifes, in which he explored the effects of light and shadow with supreme virtuosity.

Brought up in Newark, in Nottinghamshire (his father ran the family ironworks), Nicholson studied at Hubert von Herkomer’s art school in Bushey from 1888 until 1891, when he briefly attended the Académie Julian in Paris. His paintings of the early 1890s have echoes of Clausen’s rustic plein-air studies and show his admiration for Whistler and the Glasgow Boys.

In 1893, he eloped with fellow art student Mabel Pryde; their son Ben—who would go on to become a more famous painter than his father—was born in 1894. That year, Nicholson and his brother-in-law, James Pryde, who came to live with them at Denham, founded the printing partnership J. & W. Beggarstaff, named after a ‘hearty old English name’ they’d spied on a sack of fodder. Turning to advertising as more lucrative than painting, Beggarstaffs used collage and stencil to produce striking, simplified images with bold lettering that revolutionised poster design, notable examples being for productions of Hamlet (1894) and Don Quixote (1895). Toulouse- Lautrec’s lithographic posters and the graphic work of Les Nabis, especially Bonnard and Vuillard, were clearly influential, as were images associated with English folk art and crafts, which recur in Nicholson’s earlier works.