.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Cyril Reddihough met Nicholson at Banks Head in 1927 and soon became one of his most important patrons, together with Helen Sutherland and Leslie Martin. He encouraged Nicholson to travel to the Continent and in 1950 the pair made several voyages to Italy. During one of these trips they explored the towns of Tuscany - Pisa, Lucca, Siena, Arezzo and San Gimignano. The architecture and landscape of the region stimulated Nicholson's artistic sensitivities and became the subject of a series of drawings and small paintings.
In the current painting the still life composition is placed on the windowsill. The window shutter is just visible to the left of the scene and the rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside form a backdrop. The overlapping forms create a web of intersecting lines, some angular, others curving, forming an idiosyncratic depiction of space. This composition is typical of Nicholson still life paintings and drawings of the period. He had begun to depict still lifes on table tops in the 1920s, a format linked to the Cubist compositions of Picasso and Braque. By the 1940s he favoured the format of a centrally-placed still life arrangement set against a landscape, as if seen through a window, in order to play on the distinctions between foreground and background. In some of the paintings and drawings that follow this format, Nicholson includes the suggestion of a window frame and sill, as in 1943-5 (St Ives, Cornwall) (Tate, London). In others, the still life is more abstracted and seems balanced or even suspended in the foreground, for example 11 November 1947 (Mousehole) (British Council). The view-through-a-window format allowed Nicholson to explore and undermine conventional spatial relationships and create a tension between two places: inside and outside, the familiar and strange.
In the current painting the still life composition is placed on the windowsill. The window shutter is just visible to the left of the scene and the rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside form a backdrop. The overlapping forms create a web of intersecting lines, some angular, others curving, forming an idiosyncratic depiction of space. This composition is typical of Nicholson still life paintings and drawings of the period. He had begun to depict still lifes on table tops in the 1920s, a format linked to the Cubist compositions of Picasso and Braque. By the 1940s he favoured the format of a centrally-placed still life arrangement set against a landscape, as if seen through a window, in order to play on the distinctions between foreground and background. In some of the paintings and drawings that follow this format, Nicholson includes the suggestion of a window frame and sill, as in 1943-5 (St Ives, Cornwall) (Tate, London). In others, the still life is more abstracted and seems balanced or even suspended in the foreground, for example 11 November 1947 (Mousehole) (British Council). The view-through-a-window format allowed Nicholson to explore and undermine conventional spatial relationships and create a tension between two places: inside and outside, the familiar and strange.