Winifred Nicholson: an illustrated talk by Christopher Andreae

We are delighted to welcome author Christopher Andreae, who will talk about his new book, Winifred Nicholson (Lund Humphries). In the 1920s Winifred, experimenting alongside her husband Ben Nicholson, emerged as a ground-breaking painter. This is the first book for many years on this important British artist.

She studied painting privately with her grandfather, George James Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, a painter-friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, and then at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Winifred first exhibited her watercolours at the Royal Academy, London, in 1914. In 1919 she visited India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma with her father, Charles Roberts, Under-Secretary of State for India, and acknowledged that this experience liberated her painting style and her palette.

In November 1920 she married Ben Nicholson in London. Having bought the Villa Capriccio, near Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1921, two years later she purchased Bankshead, a Cumbrian farmhouse built on Hadrian’s Wall, near to her ancestral home of Naworth Castle. Bankshead remained her base for the rest of her life.

Between 1921 and 1924 Nicholson and her husband painted landscapes and still-lifes in the winter in Switzerland and in the summer at Bankshead. In 1923 an exhibition of her work was held at Patterson’s Gallery, Bond St, London. During the early 1920s Nicholson became a Christian Scientist and concentrated in her painting on the metaphysical nature of the world. After the break-up of her marriage she went to Paris (1932–8), where she experimented with abstraction, and became a close friend of Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, César Domela, Jean Hélion and Hans Arp. From the 1950s to the 1970s she travelled to Greece, Morocco, France and the Scottish Islands on painting trips, seeking fresh experiences of colour and light.

Thursday 18 June, 6.30
Central Library Committee Room