Review
“Nicholson had a ‘romance with anonymity’ which Schwartz has now dispelled.”—Patrick O’Connor, Literary Review


Book Description
William Nicholson (1872–1949) was an English painter of ravishingly beautiful still lifes and landscapes. Yet he holds an uncertain place in British art, largely because he left no statements about his aims and indirectly because his son--the better-known artist Ben Nicholson--subtly downplayed his father’s achievements.

In this lively book, the first full critical biography of William Nicholson, Sanford Schwartz argues that the artist’s output has a coherent philosophical and psychological unity very much in harmony with his times, and he links Nicholson’s work in fascinating ways to that of his fellow artists. Schwartz also portrays Nicholson’s personal life in a more complex light, finding that it was a series of rivalries and collaborations with many individuals and that Nicholson’s uneasy relationship with his son Ben plagued him for years. Generously illustrated with paintings, drawings, and photographs, many of which are reproduced for the first time, this book reassesses Nicholson’s achievement and position within twentieth-century art.







About the Author
Sanford Schwartz, a freelance art writer, has contributed to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New Republic, and is the author of several books.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

William Nicholson (1872-1949) was a painter of ravishingly beautiful still lifes and landscapes. He was also an internationally known postermaker and graphic artist as well as a theater designer and children's book illustrator and author. Yet he holds an uncertain place in British art, largely because he left no statements about his aims and, indirectly, because his son -- the better-known artist Ben Nicholson -- subtly downplayed his father's achievements.

In this lively book, the first full critical biography of William Nicholson, Sanford Schwartz shows that the artist's output has a coherent philosophical and psychological unity very much in harmony with his times. Schwartz argues that in many of his formats, Nicholson was concerned with the delights and deceptions of sheer looking, and that he shared goals both with contemporaries such as Walter Sickert and with a host of twentieth-century painters including Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud. Schwartz links Nicholson's radically casual still lifes, telephoto-like views, and experiments with mirrored images to the work of a range of his fellow artists. Presenting Nicholson in relation, too, to Rudyard Kipling, Max Beerbohm, and Gordon Craig, among others, Schwartz points out how his feeling for scale, proportion, and relativity were part of a generation's quest to alter the priorities of their Victorian forbears. The Nicholson who emerges is a wily and quietly subversive creator.