The British painter William Nicholson (1872-1949) has featured in a number of exhibitions at Pallant Home Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, in recent times. His difficult, a lot misunderstood, relationship together with his eldest son shaped the prologue to Ben Nicholson: From the Studio in 2021; 4 of his spare depictions of the South Downs have been included within the gallery’s 2022 survey of Sussex landscapes; and his shimmering The Silver Casket and Purple Leather-based Field (1920) was a spotlight of final 12 months’s anthology of Fashionable British nonetheless lifes. Now he’s taking centre stage on the gallery within the first full survey accorded to him in quarter of a century.
Nicholson’s output was prolific and eclectic: spectacularly dramatic posters, made in collaboration together with his brother-in-law James Pryde, underneath the pseudonym of the Beggarstaff Brothers; splendidly witty woodcuts, together with the celebrated portfolios An Alphabet and London Varieties; e-book illustrations; commissions for the theatre (he designed the costumes for the primary efficiency of Peter Pan); portraits, each of youngsters and people he referred to as his “good sitters”, which have been his main supply of earnings; and the ravishing nonetheless lifes and serene landscapes he made for his personal diversion.
“Previous exhibitions have typically siloed the completely different points of Nicholson’s work, with a give attention to simply his work or his graphic work,” says the Pallant Home Gallery director Simon Martin. “This present seems to be at him within the spherical, evincing his versatility throughout completely different media and genres and contemplating how they inform and relate to one another.”
A damned dandy
Nicholson defies simple categorisation—one motive he has generally been damned as a minor artist. He belonged to no motion, declined all invites to hitch exhibiting societies or inventive organisations and was steadfastly unrevealing about his personal work. In some ways he was an archetypal Edwardian, a dandy who painted in his customary outfit of bow tie, fancy waistcoat, white trousers and patent leather-based sneakers and who, like his buddy Rudyard Kipling, inhabited a world dominated by Empire and the Nice Conflict. However Nicholson was not merely a flatterer of the wealthy and highly effective: his imposing full-length portrait of Duffadar Valayat Shah, the Muslim orderly of Lord Hardinge, the viceroy of India (1915), on mortgage from Nottingham Fort Museum, is endowed with far better dignity and sentiment than Nicholson may muster for the viceroy himself.
And though a lot of Nicholson’s mature work appears to go towards the grain of Modernist apply, as Martin says, “his strategy to rendering mild and tone was basically summary” and conveys an aesthetic hardly much less pared-down than that exemplified by his son Ben’s white reliefs.
Nicholson is far admired for his bravura brushwork, his unabashed sensuality and his unrivalled capacity to seize the precise high quality of sunshine because it falls on a glass or steel floor. The exhibition will include loads of his extra acquainted and best-loved photographs: Gertrude Jekyll’s battered previous gardening boots, immortalised on canvas whereas ready for his reluctant topic to sit down for him; the distant buildings at Judd’s Farm silhouetted on the Downs close to Rottingdean; and the lustrous, but unostentatious, Gold Jug (on mortgage from the Royal Assortment). However the present additionally goals to reveal that Nicholson was a extra refined and unique determine than the person who, in Ben’s phrases, “merely needed to color”.
• William Nicholson, Pallant Home Gallery, Chichester, 22 November-10 Could 2026
