William Nicholson (review)

Setting out as an artist in the 1890s, William Nicholson came into the orbit of James Whistler, and, to a considerable degree, he remained a Whistlerian artist, as evidenced by the high horizon and narrow tonal range of a work such as Lido, 5 pm, painted as late as 1937. Their friendship began when Whistler praised Nicholson's woodblock portrait of Queen Victoria, eliciting the modest reply, "Her Majesty was a wonderful subject," to which the usually acerbic Butterfly supposedly responded, "Her Majesty might say the same of you." We might also say the same regarding the subject of the book under review. Nicholson, long semi-forgotten, and primarily remembered as the father of the better-known Ben Nicholson, was a wonderful artist, and he and his art are the subjects of this excellent book by Sanford Schwartz.

This is not a conventional fact-filled monograph, but rather a focused look at the paintings themselves. Although Schwartz does devote extended and fascinating passages to some of Nicholson's contemporaries, most notably to William Orpen, he pays relatively little attention to the usual art-historical questions of sources and influences. Instead, written as if to overcome a twenty-first-century reader's possible resistance to an unfamiliar subject, the book is full of comparisons to more recent, and usually American, art. There are more references to Alex Katz than to John Singer Sargent, although Sargent dominated the world of Edwardian portraiture as Nicholson was embarking on a career as a portraitist. Regarding Lido, 5 pm, Schwartz mentions Yves Tanguy and Ellsworth Kelly rather than Whistler, and in doing so, he presents Nicholson not as a Victorian relic, but as relevant to present-day artistic concerns.

As a Victorian—that is, before 1901—Nicholson was a graphic artist. In 1894, with his brother-in-law James Pryde, he formed a partnership, "J. and W. Beggarstaff," to make posters. Based on cutting and pasting, these posters had a look as bold and innovative as anything being produced anywhere at the time, rivaled in England in audacity only by the very different art of Aubrey Beardsley. From the Beggarstaff partnership, Nicholson went on to produce several series of woodblock illustrations, adapting the poster style to more domesticated purposes. The first of these prints to be published, in June 1897, was the Queen Victoria admired by Whistler, to be followed soon by portrayals of Whistler himself, Sarah Bernhardt, Rudyard Kipling, and other celebrities or near celebrities. Nicholson also produced albums or almanacs devoted to sports, London types, and an illustrated alphabet. The prints are easy to enjoy, and they perhaps remain Nicholson's most admired work, but around 1900 he abandoned printmaking as his prime activity to turn to painting. And it is Nicholson's painting to which Schwartz devotes most attention.

For some forty years, Nicholson made his living as a portrait painter and was successful enough to be awarded a knighthood in 1936. Yet, while he received the necessary commissions and hobnobbed with the great, he never became a member of, nor exhibited at, the Royal Academy. Portraiture was his day job; his significant engagement as a painter lay in the more private realms of still life and landscape. These works are invariably modest in size and unprepossessing in subject. They also seem deeply conservative, reflecting no evident awareness of Fauvism or Cubism, or any other art since Edouard Manet. But they are invariably beautifully painted and are full of formal invention, wry observation, and witty detail, and Schwartz's accounts open our eyes to these things. He is especially good at explaining the difficult formal challenges—caused by reflections on glossy surfaces, odd vantage points, and so on—that the artist posed for himself, challenges that make us recognize Nicholson as a far more ambitious, complex, and genuinely interesting painter than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Schwartz achieves this by taking a close view, as if through a microscope, rarely looking at a...