The genius of William Nicholson

Even if you think you don’t know William Nicholson, it’s a fair bet that you’ve come across his work. If you’ve read those excellent children’s books, The Velveteen Rabbit or Clever Bill, you’ll have taken in his drawings – never wholly sentimental, even the rabbit – into your mental world. And if you’ve seen his woodcuts (they’re everywhere) – say, of Queen Victoria looking stout and dour – you’ll have noticed their economy, their clever use of space and their humour. This exhibition has the familiar elements of his work, but also the grander stuff: the still lifes, the landscapes, the portraits. Then there are the unexpected aspects – who knew he designed costumes for the stage production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan? His work evolved with the times, and the times changed dramatically.

Of course versatility has its dangers; by being so fluent, so prolific in several genres, and so popular as a portraitist, Nicholson risks being underrated, and dangerously hard to label, but it’s impossible to come away from this excellent exhibition without being struck by his extraordinary skill and by the sense that he clearly took a palpable delight in his work.

So many things will stay with you: one was the wonderful, Chardin-like stillness of ‘The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas’ (1911), a marvel of silvery simplicity; the other was the busy end-papers he painted for The Velveteen Rabbit, a plethora of lively scribbled rabbits over a cheerful blue and yellow ground. Acute, serious, almost Jamesian observation married to playful whimsy… How to sum him up?

Paul Nash, a friend of Nicholson’s artist son Ben, recalls that before the first world war, he was ‘particularly conspicuous as an artistic personality, no other painter being quite so brilliant an executant. All his work had an air of easy mastery and good quality’. One reason for his conspicuousness was that he was a dandy, as we see in the portrait by his wife Mabel at the start of the show: he’s raffish, with his cane, tight cut-away coat and white kid gloves. There’s a funny caricature of him by Ivan Wilkie Brooks, looming in his elegant spotted dressing gown above son Ben who is furiously painting below.

The excellence of his poster work can be overlooked, simply because it has been so influential and so widely copied. But it is his portraits that are so striking. The pared-down quality of his woodcut of a saturnine Whistler is also evident in his portrayal of a melancholic J.M. Barrie. There’s an affectionate drawing of his son Tony in uniform in 1916; he was killed a month before the Armistice. The young man bears an uncanny resemblance to the subject of ‘A Soldier in the 1914-18 War’ (1917); there he is watchful, leaning against the sandbags.

There’s also a memorable double portrait of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their dog at their fire, their work on the history of the Poor Law evident in the notebooks and box files on the floor. And look at his depiction of Sybil Hart-Davis. There she is in her negligee occupying the corner of the picture; the rest is an expanse of white wall and painted screen.

Objects are as lovingly portrayed as people. The fraying, dark brown boots of gardener Gertrude Jekyll get their very own painting. ‘Gold Jug’ (1937) is wonderful, not just for the reflected light but for the charcoal drawing behind it. The show also displays Nicholson’s actual silver tea caddy next to its memorable depiction in 1920 with a pair of blue gloves.

There are times when he approaches abstraction, especially in his landscapes: when a bold sweep of white will serve for a fall of snow (see below). Take ‘Mending the Nets, Rottingdean’ (1909), a memorably spare seascape with the nets between the men’s hands depicted in one sure stroke of paint, or the evocatively simple ‘Sunset’ (1912).

Don’t miss the costume designs: delicious things. And there’s his Book of Blokes (1929), a funny series of men’s faces done with as few lines as possible.