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Lot Essay
When Winifred Nicholson lived in Paris from 1932-38 she also made a number of trips to the South of France staying with friends and where the current picture was almost certainly painted.
Orchis is characteristic of the more structurally defined use of colour in the works from this time (see for example René’s Room, 1936, in the collection at Leeds Museums and Galleries). In a 1936 article by Alexander Watt, her paintings of this period are discussed:
'Most of the pictures she exhibited at her second one-man show at the Leicester Galleries, in 1936, were landscapes painted in the region of the Pyrenees. The limpid skies, the red soil and the richly coloured flora of this part of France fully justified these brilliant chromatic studies. But, little by little, she was moved to abandon form in favour of colour. What she felt was of importance to her in the rendering of a flower was not so much the significance of its form as the import of its colour. She deemed it sufficient that one should have the necessary sculptural imagination to apprehend the true form of the object portrayed. This conception was to bring about a mental adjustment to a new point of view. The arithmetic of abstraction alone seemed to solve her problem of colour. She was soon brought to regard colour no longer as an accessory characteristic of form but rather as an individual element fully expressing itself in terms of vibration, music. In holding that colour loses its significance in being tied down to form, Winifred Nicholson took to painting shapes of colour as removed from shapes of form. This study of colour had a marked effect on the type of flower picture that she had been accustomed to paint. She now abandoned the former sensitive impressionism of her flower paintings and turned to a more significant, more clearly and structurally defined use of colour in the interpretation of her landscapes and flower pieces' (A. Watt, 'Winifred Nicholson', The Artist, September 1937, p. 26).
The date of 1928 on the reverse of Orchis possibly refers to an earlier work on the canvas beneath.
We are very grateful to Jovan Nicholson for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Orchis is characteristic of the more structurally defined use of colour in the works from this time (see for example René’s Room, 1936, in the collection at Leeds Museums and Galleries). In a 1936 article by Alexander Watt, her paintings of this period are discussed:
'Most of the pictures she exhibited at her second one-man show at the Leicester Galleries, in 1936, were landscapes painted in the region of the Pyrenees. The limpid skies, the red soil and the richly coloured flora of this part of France fully justified these brilliant chromatic studies. But, little by little, she was moved to abandon form in favour of colour. What she felt was of importance to her in the rendering of a flower was not so much the significance of its form as the import of its colour. She deemed it sufficient that one should have the necessary sculptural imagination to apprehend the true form of the object portrayed. This conception was to bring about a mental adjustment to a new point of view. The arithmetic of abstraction alone seemed to solve her problem of colour. She was soon brought to regard colour no longer as an accessory characteristic of form but rather as an individual element fully expressing itself in terms of vibration, music. In holding that colour loses its significance in being tied down to form, Winifred Nicholson took to painting shapes of colour as removed from shapes of form. This study of colour had a marked effect on the type of flower picture that she had been accustomed to paint. She now abandoned the former sensitive impressionism of her flower paintings and turned to a more significant, more clearly and structurally defined use of colour in the interpretation of her landscapes and flower pieces' (A. Watt, 'Winifred Nicholson', The Artist, September 1937, p. 26).
The date of 1928 on the reverse of Orchis possibly refers to an earlier work on the canvas beneath.
We are very grateful to Jovan Nicholson for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.