Winifred Nicholson valuation
Painted flowers on windowsills against landscape and light, and colour itself, from Cumberland to Paris.
Winifred Nicholson was born Winifred Roberts in Oxford in 1893, the granddaughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, an amateur painter and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites who first taught her to paint.
What a work by Winifred Nicholson is worth
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Bio
Winifred Nicholson was born Winifred Roberts in Oxford in 1893, the granddaughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, an amateur painter and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites who first taught her to paint. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art, travelled to India and Burma with her father in 1919, and in 1920 married the painter Ben Nicholson. They spent winters at Lugano in Switzerland and summers in Britain, and from 1924 lived at Bankshead, a farmhouse on Hadrian's Wall in Cumberland, painting side by side. After their separation in 1931 she lived in Paris with their three children, among the abstract artists there, before returning to Cumberland. Her best-known paintings set flowers in jars on windowsills against the landscape beyond, in clear, luminous colour. She died in Cumbria in 1981.
She painted steadily for sixty years, and her flower pieces and landscapes come up often; the works of the 1920s and early 1930s, her years with Ben Nicholson, are the best known, and her abstract paintings of the 1930s are rarer. A provenance through the family is common.
Lugano, Bankshead and Paris
In Paris in the 1930s she knew Mondrian and Jean Hélion and made a group of abstract paintings of her own.
Her daughter Kate Nicholson is also a painter. Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, whose founder Jim Ede was a close friend, holds a fine group of her work.
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