The little master

One-hundred-and-fifty years after the painter’s birth, Jack Watkins considers the artistic endeavours of Sir William Nicholson, best known as the father of abstract artist Ben Nicholson, but whose work displays a satisfying warmth, mastery of technique and an old-school, painterly finish

- Jack Watkins

MANY in number are the sons and daughters operating in the creative and performing arts whose names have been over shadowed by that of an illustrious parent. With Sir William and Ben Nicholson, however, the standings are reversed. Open any general dictionary of art and the entry on Ben is certain to be at least twice the length of the one devoted to his father. Where Nicholson Jnr has been described as ‘the only English painter to develop a pure abstract art of international quality between the two World Wars’, Sir William is seen as a minor player.

Aligned to no particular school, with no expressed interest in changing the direction of modern art, at best he was ‘the little master’ who ‘lacked that ruthlessness that is usually considered to be an appurtenance of genius’, according to Lillian Browse, organiser of a retrospective at the National Gallery in 1942. Even the knighthood, bestowed in 1936, sat uneasily upon his shoulders and he eventually chose to ignore it entirely, wrote Browse.

Ben said his father ‘merely wanted to paint’ and to let his pictures speak for themselves. They certainly were dramatically uneventful and untroubled, executed in the manner of someone who ‘betrayed little awareness of Matisse, Picasso, or, really, any of the transformations of art in the twentieth century’, as Sanford Schwartz, one of his more recent champions, has written. Yet, they also display a satisfying warmth, a mastery of technique and an old-school, painterly finish. They are not introspective, concerned as Sir William was with representing the surface appearance of his subjects, but they are cast with a serenity and ease of touch that seems reflective of the personality of their creator.