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Lot Essay
Born in Cupar, Fife, and trained as a lawyer at St Andrew’s, Nicholson turned to art at twenty-two and studied at the Ruskin School, Oxford from 1879. The present watercolour may be seen as his masterpiece, executed on a large scale and exhibited at the Scottish Royal Academy when he was twenty-eight and reaching the height of his powers.
Nicholson spent 1881-2 in Paris, where he studied under the portrait painter Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), and was influenced by the work of the Barbizon School on a trip to Brittany in the spring of 1882. Their concentration on tonal harmonies and realism, taking scenes of everyday life as their subject matter, would shape Nicholson’s work from this point onwards.
On his return to Edinburgh, Nicholson developed a routine of spending spring and summer in Fife, autumn in the Highlands, and the winter in Edinburgh, where he would work up compositions such as the present work for exhibition the following year.
While working on the present watercolour, Nicholson wrote to a friend, ‘I am driving at a style of Art which is to consist of taking the most usual, vulgar it may be called, things in the most everyday country life, and by choosing the moment, the attitude, the effect, to produce an emotion of a certain sort.’ (H. Bellyse Baildon, Peter Walker Nicholson and his works, Edinburgh, 1886, p. 36).
These aims were shared by Frederick Walker (1840-1875) and George Heming Mason (1818-1872), both of whose work Nicholson greatly admired. The influence of Walker, whose works evoke a simple pastoral life and whose figures are posed in what Ruskin referred to as 'galvanised Elgin' attitudes, is particularly evident in the present watercolour, which in composition and subject matter recalls Walker's Vagrants, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868 and subsequently engraved.
Nicholson died just three years after the present work was painted in a boating accident off Cromarty, and so his artistic legacy has been somewhat overlooked.
Nicholson spent 1881-2 in Paris, where he studied under the portrait painter Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), and was influenced by the work of the Barbizon School on a trip to Brittany in the spring of 1882. Their concentration on tonal harmonies and realism, taking scenes of everyday life as their subject matter, would shape Nicholson’s work from this point onwards.
On his return to Edinburgh, Nicholson developed a routine of spending spring and summer in Fife, autumn in the Highlands, and the winter in Edinburgh, where he would work up compositions such as the present work for exhibition the following year.
While working on the present watercolour, Nicholson wrote to a friend, ‘I am driving at a style of Art which is to consist of taking the most usual, vulgar it may be called, things in the most everyday country life, and by choosing the moment, the attitude, the effect, to produce an emotion of a certain sort.’ (H. Bellyse Baildon, Peter Walker Nicholson and his works, Edinburgh, 1886, p. 36).
These aims were shared by Frederick Walker (1840-1875) and George Heming Mason (1818-1872), both of whose work Nicholson greatly admired. The influence of Walker, whose works evoke a simple pastoral life and whose figures are posed in what Ruskin referred to as 'galvanised Elgin' attitudes, is particularly evident in the present watercolour, which in composition and subject matter recalls Walker's Vagrants, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868 and subsequently engraved.
Nicholson died just three years after the present work was painted in a boating accident off Cromarty, and so his artistic legacy has been somewhat overlooked.