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B en Nicholson was born in Buckinghamshire in 1894 to artist parents, William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He started his artistic education at age 16 at the Slade School of Art. In 1912, he spent two years travelling in France and Italy and then went to the United States in 1917. His early paintings were still lifes and landscapes, much in the style of his father. In 1919 he had his first exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery and Grafton Galleries. After marrying his first wife, Winifred Roberts, in 1920, the couple moved to Switzerland for three years before moving back to the UK. During this period, his figurative and abstract works began to take on some of the qualities of the Post- impressionist and Cubist works he had seen during his travels to Paris. By 1931, his growing relationship with Barbara Hepworth led to his divorce from Winifred. Hepworth's influence, in addition to his French contemporaries, turned Nicholson further towards abstraction. He joined the Abstraction-Creation association in 1933 and became close with Piet Mondrian as a result. at same year, he made his first abstract relief. In the years that followed, Nicholson provided some of the most uncompromising examples of British abstract art and was recognized as one of the foremost modern artists in the country. He became a member of Paul Nash's Unit One in 1933 and one of the editors of Circle in 1937 alongside Naum Gabo and Leslie Martin, before moving to Cornwall with Hepworth, whom he married in 1938. ere, they were at the heart of the St Ives School, alongside friends Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Bryan Wynter and others. e artist's reputation only grew, representing Britain in the 1954 Venice Biennale alongside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and exhibiting his work across the globe. However, after Hepworth and Nicholson's divorce in 1951, Nicholson moved to Switzerland and remarried to his third wife Felicitas Volger. After the accolades and awards that followed the Second World War, he returned to London in 1971. His later work included both figuration and abstraction, as well as large, free-standing reliefs. Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) 11