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WINIFRED NICHOLSON (1893-1981) Flowers from the Riviera, c.1930s Oil on board 40.5 x 51.5 cm (16 x 20 ¼ in) Provenance The Lefevre Gallery, London Cyril S. Reddihough (probably purchased from the above), thence by descent Private Collection, U.K. Exhibited London, The Lefevre Gallery, Recent Paintings by Winifred Nicholson and John Wells, April 1946, cat. no. 16 Despite Ede's long friendship with Winifred Nicholson, he acquired her work sparsely and serendipitously. He could not claim (as he did with Hepworth) that it was because of a tardy ability to 'see' and appreciate sculpture. A radical thought, maybe, but might he have been uncomfortable with women artists? A glance at Ede's collection reveals remarkably few. Ede had watched Winifred paint Seascape (Sea and Sand) (1926) and acquired it soon afterwards. A few years later, he acquired her portrait of Sam Graves, the youngest child of the poet Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson, Winifred's sister-in-law, 'because a dealer would not show it in an exhibition, it was too childish'. He hung it at Kettle's Yard near where his grandchildren slept. 1 A painting of Vera Moore playing the piano he gave to the University of Essex. Each of Winifred Nicholson's works in the Kettle's Yard collection has a story. 2 Cyclamen and Primula (c.1923), seen by Ede around the time it was painted, was bought much later from a Cambridge dealer who 'recognised it, so dirty as to be hardly visible', bought it cheaply and let Ede (who scrubbed it further) have it for what he could afford. 3 Road Along the Roman Wall (1926), Seascape with Dinghy (1932), Flodigarry Island, Skye (1949) Daffodils and Hyacinths in a Norman Window (c.1950–55) and Fireside (1956) were bequeathed by Helen Sutherland in 1965 to Nicolete Gray, who gave them to Ede. (Of these, Road Along the Roman Wall had once been lent to Ede at Elm Row. He tried to sell it to the Contemporary Art Society, who refused, then Sutherland bought it.) 4 It was not until 1967, having seen an exhibition of her work in London, that Ede bought another Winifred Nicholson: the ethereal White Saxifrage (aka Wild Lilies, Greece) (1966). Even then, as Ede told Ben, he was trying to buy an earlier painting, a 'very old stager of the mirror on dressing table Sutton Veney [sic] which was so early in our lives'. 5 Problematically to today's eyes, in 1928 Ede had described Winifred Nicholson as 'essentially a woman painter', albeit 'foremost amongst those of today'. He continued: She does not endeavour to hide her sex in her work – she is proud of it, and brings to painting a woman's attitude which we cannot feel to be merely a weak version of a masculine one any more than we feel this of Emily Bronte. They are both inherently feminine. 6 Ede remained comfortable enough with what he had written to reproduce this passage over fifty years later, even adding, 'This should not be a curiosity, but it is, for it is very rarely that in externalised expression a woman reaches the essence of her own personality.' 7 Possibly Ede regarded Winifred Nicholson's work as less in need of promotion, in the 1920s and 1930s, than Ben's. 8 Notwithstanding, Ede learnt much from Winifred, evident in Kettle's Yard's splashes of colour, light, flowers, and the 'joy of opening windows; not only material ones'. 9 1 Ede named the subject of the painting as Jake (Ben and Winifred Nicholson's son). A Way of Life, pp. 222, 103. 2 Only one, Winter, Banks Head (early 1970s), was donated after Ede's death, in 2002. 3 Ede, A Way of Life, p.40. 4 Freeman, pp. 257, 109. 5 Ede, postcard to Ben Nicholson, 2 August 1967, Tate Archive, TGA 8717/1/2/982. Winifred Nicholson's painting Dressing Table, Sutton Veny (c.1925) was made while staying with Ben's father, William Nicholson in Wiltshire. 6 H.S. Ede, 'Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson and William Staite Murray', Artwork Vol. 4 no. 16, Winter 1928, p.267. 7 Ede, A Way of Life, p.221. 8 In 'H.S. Ede, "A friend of artists"', Apollo, October 2000, pp. 42–3, Rowena Joy Smith notes that critics reacted more positively to Winifred Nicholson's work than Ben's. 9 Ede, A Way of Life, p.221. 84

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