William Nicholson at Pallant House Gallery (Exhibition Review)
Pallant House Gallery 22 November 2025 - 10 May 2026 Catalogue ed. Simon Martin and Melanie Vanderbrouck, Yale University Press, 2026
I was recently taxed with a question by one of my grandchildren, who asked, without a hint of irony, “Why do we have art galleries?” Simple question, tricky answer: To show off great art? To preserve national heritage? Or, as in the case of Pallant House Gallery, to remind us of the special qualities of an artist whom many have forgotten or never even heard of? William Nicholson, father of the better-known Ben and often dismissed by critics as ‘old-fashioned,’ was born in 1872. From an early age he displayed a prodigious artistic talent, and while at grammar school he took private lessons with William Cobley, a professional landscape and portrait painter of some talent. Then, aged sixteen, he attended Hubert von Herkomer’s art school, and later continued his studies in Paris.
We know most artists by their distinctive style or the chosen medium in which they usually worked. A Van Gogh painting or a Degas pastel sketch of ballet dancers is easily recognisable, but William Nicholson’s wildly varied career presents us with an unusual challenge. Early on he and his brother-in-law James Pryde produced Radical posters and woodcuts that were internationally acclaimed, leading Nicholson to publish a number of successful children’s books illustrated with his distinctive engravings. Although well received, they did not provide him and his growing family with financial security, and by the turn of the century he had turned to portrait painting instead. Later in his career Nicholson gave up portraiture in favour of landscapes and still lifes, and in amongst all this he also found some time to design stage sets and theatre costumes.
This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are organised chronologically, which helps to track how the artist developed and improved over his long career. The early posters are still striking, with their flattened forms and simple use of colour. The lettering is almost always black, as are many of the figures, with (usually) only a single colour deployed as contrast. These effects are simple but impactful: nothing in the image is superfluous to its purpose, whether it is advertising cocoa or a production of Hamlet.
Following these first successes Nicholson and Pryde’s venture failed financially, and Nicholson split from his brother-in-law. However, in 1896 his hand-coloured print of Persimmon, the Derby-winning horse belonging to the Prince of Wales, was displayed at the Fine Art Society exhibition. Nicholson began to make woodcut portraits of famous figures, and his first, of Queen Victoria, was a great success. The Queen is shown walking her Skye terrier, supporting her large figure on a cane. Her body is a perfect triangle, her bulk hidden by the black expanse of her cape and voluminous dress. Unlike many contemporary images of the Queen, the work contains no hint of majesty or grandeur: if it were simply entitled ‘large old lady walking her dog,’ this would be entirely fitting. Nicholson succeeds in revealing the elderly Queen’s humanity without resorting to caricature or satirical humour. The portrait is a masterpiece of understatement, expressing a complete understanding of its subject.
Over the next five years Nicholson concentrated his energies on publishing small collections of woodcut figures for children, his most popular being An Alphabet and London Types. The Alphabet is still in print today, its choice of characters to represent the letters idiosyncratic in the extreme. Selecting ‘Artist’ to represent A seems obvious, but Nicholson’s self-portrait as a street artist displays a quirky sense of humour. Other selections seem informed by social realism: Beggar for B, Urchin for U, or Flower Girl for F. The original choices for E and T, Executioner and Toper (alcoholic!) respectively, were initially rejected as too disturbing for children, but were retained in the deluxe edition. Stylistically the prints are all very similar. The figures are simplified, often like his Queen Victoria in that they present as a simple one-coloured shape in the centre of the plate, with no discernible background. However, they are notable for being rooted in the everyday life of the street. Although the working-class and poor might seem unusual choices for a book clearly aimed at middle- and upper-class parents, the inclusion of the people whom their children would see on street corners suggests a progressive instinct to record everyday figures irrespective of social standing. Nicholson followed the Alphabet with An Almanack of Twelve Sports and then, in 1898, London Types.
The latter follows a similar simple, stylised approach. Again heavy blocks of black are balanced against a pale background, but now there are also recognisable locations: the Guardsman, for example, is positioned outside Buckingham Palace. What is most notable about this set, however, is the clear emphasis upon the working man, his problems and hardships. These images are not idealised in any way: the Bus Driver (Knightsbridge Road) is clearly exhausted after a day in his horse-drawn cab, while Her Majesty’s Waterman looks ready to take on all comers with his fists.
By the turn of the century Nicholson began to concentrate on portraiture. He quickly obtained commissions to paint the rich and famous, but one particular portrait in the exhibition stands out, not simply for its quality but also for what it prefigures of his art’s development. In 1901 he decided to paint his eldest son Ben, then —according to the title— aged “six or seven” (oddly his father seemed to lack certainty regarding his own son’s age!) Nicholson had for many years been an admirer of Whistler, and this fine painting clearly shows his influence. The young Ben stands before an indistinct and muted background. There is an absence of colour: the wall is grey, while the rest of the environment is in indeterminate brown and black. Ben looks slightly bemused, as if wondering why he is standing there. As in the later portraits, the subject contains little emotion, with the interest residing rather in Nicholson as the painter and the artificiality of the scene that he has conjured.
In that same year, 1901, Nicholson was commissioned to paint the portrait of W. E. Henley, the late Victorian poet and editor. The subject is again placed within an indistinct space, this time seated on a dark brown chair. Henley had suffered much ill health from an early age, and had one leg amputated when he was just twelve. He was known for his sharp intellect and quick temper, but little of this character can be discerned from the portrait: he looks out from the picture space, his eyes fixed firmly on us, but they give little away. The dark brown suit contrasts with the pale background, but it seems that Henley is more interested in us than Nicholson is in him. Again, the influence of Whistler is obvious in this tonal work which explores the relationship of darker and lighter shades together.
Other portraits followed the same pattern. In 1902 Nicholson painted the essayist and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm, and in 1904 he completed a portrait of J. M. Barrie. Both pictures show the subject standing against a pale tan background which is fused into the edges of the painting. Each man looks off to the side, as if avoiding the eyes of both the artist and the viewer. The subjects reveal little of their individual characters, presenting themselves as confident, well-dressed, middle-aged men, successful in their fields. What is special about these works, and several others that Nicholson produced over the next ten years or so, is the way that he handles the paint. The tonal qualities appear effortless, but in fact required a great deal of skill and an almost-perfect eye.
Alongside all the different artistic genres previously mentioned, there are some Nicholson works that defy categorisation, particularly those paintings which capture modernity and war. In this final group two pictures stand out, both completed towards the end of World War I. In 1917 Nicholson painted a single soldier, apparently in a trench waiting for the signal to go over the top. Again Nicholson uses the side view that he liked so much: the soldier is dressed for cold weather, a fur skin visible on top of his uniform. He has fixed the bayonet on his rifle, which suggests that he is getting ready for close combat — truly a matter of life and death, reflected in the unblinking concentration on the man’s face.
The second painting, from 1918, is so personal that it is arguably one of the most powerful made during that deeply tragic time. In 1916 Nicholson’s second son, Tony, was called up to fight. (Ben, the elder son, had been exempted from service due to his severe asthma.) Late in 1918, just one month before the Armistice, Nicholson received news that Tony had died of his wounds. While Nicholson loved all his children, it was said that he was closest to Tony. In the summer Tony had come home on leave but then caught the ’flu, which hospitalised him for a while. When he returned home again he infected Edith, Nicholson’s wife, and she later died in hospital. So in the space of a few months Nicholson lost his beloved wife and then a precious child. After this, he produced Armistice Night 1918.
At first glance the painting seems to depict joyous celebrations. Enormous gun barrels point towards the night sky, with cheering figures precariously perched on them, just about clinging on. In the foreground figures on crutches are slowly making their way home. However, when one starts to look at the background, the perspective changes: the buildings behind the guns are lit as if by exploding ordinance, and there is a cascade of light at the very top which surely replicates a bursting shell in all its fury. It is well known that Siegfried Sassoon was furious about the wild Armistice celebrations, which he saw as disrespectful and unworthy of the sacrifices that the common soldiers had made, worsened by their leaders’ incompetence. Here, Nicholson seems to share this opinion: he had just lost two loved ones, one to the war and one to the epidemic that was just beginning, and he was clearly not in the mood to celebrate anything.
In the latter part of his career Nicholson again changed direction, with still-life and then landscape painting coming to the fore, while he also returned to book illustration with the enormously popular Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (1922), still in print today. However, it is probably the beautiful still-life paintings for which he is now best remembered. This exhibition has several very fine examples, including the early The Lustre Bowl (1908), and two much later works, The Silver Casket (1919) and The Silver Casket and Red Leather Box (1920). The still-life genre is difficult to master, and for the viewer it can be even more difficult to completely unravel the intentions behind such enigmatic images. In this respect, the last two works share a helpful similarity. Each shows a silver pot, beautifully painted with light gleaming on the surface, while there are gloves on the table and the background is indistinguishable, with black and grey framing the pot. There is a quiet serenity about both paintings, which suggest some interesting ideas.
Nicholson was fascinated by reflectivity: in many of his still-life paintings we find light shining on the subject’s surface, in these two cases on the silver casket. In the 1919 version, the light is such that the blue gloves and the red and black necklaces beside them are twisted in their reflection on the casket. Not only does this display tremendous artistic dexterity, it also triggers awareness of the mystery that surrounds us in everyday life. Who notices the beauty that can be seen in a reflective surface? Do we ever have time to admire the simple shape of a glove on a table? Nicholson not only makes us admire his consummate skill, he uses ordinary objects to show us the loveliness around us, if only we trouble to look.
He did the same with the final genre that he perfected, landscape painting. In 1915 he accepted a commission to paint the Viceroy of India, Charles Hardinge. Nicholson found the portrait difficult, since the Viceroy was rarely available for sittings, but he used his spare time ‘on location’ to record his impressions of the area, producing the magnificent Bombay Landscape (1915). As the catalogue states, the painting has very clear references to the Dutch artist Meindert Hobbema, who specialised in tranquil landscapes, often with rows of tall trees reaching upwards. Nicholson uses the same technique in this painting, using the trees to draw the eye from the brown earth into the sky.
Because of the many different and varying formats that Nicholson mastered, it is impossible to pigeonhole him. His son is rated as an abstract artist, Sickert painted scenes from everyday life, and the Futurists celebrated the modern machine age. They are all easy to classify, and we know what to expect from them. Nicholson, by contrast, is something of an enigma. Hugely talented, and able to turn his hand to just about anything, he rejected the various experimental styles that were appearing in the first half of the century to follow his own path, using traditional stylistic motifs to produce paintings that both satisfied him and were accessible to others. This exhibition contains several extremely beautiful works, including portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes, alongside the remarkable woodcuts. It is a tribute to an artist who for so long has been overshadowed by his son and condemned for being insufficiently ‘modern’. The show demonstrates that this view is seriously wrong and that, instead, it is time to recognise Nicholson as one of the finest artists of his generation, worthy to stand alongside those early twentieth-century European masters whom we admire so much.--Paul Flux
