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Lot Essay
Feb 14–49 (bottle) was painted at Chy-an-Kerris, the house at Carbis Bay, Cornwall, where Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth had lived and worked since 1942. Where much of his post-war still life work gathers jugs, cups and goblets across a crowded tabletop, the present work isolates a single vessel, filling the board almost to its edges. Jeremy Lewison described the effect with precision: the bottle is given ‘a monumental and structural quality evocative of sculpture and architecture’ (J. Lewison, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Ben Nicholson, October 1993 – January 1994, p. 227).
The bottle’s curved outline anticipates Nicholson's later depictions of the steeple of the Catholic Church in St Ives, as in December 1951 (St Ives – oval and steeple), while the faceted segmentation of its lower body recalls the turret window of the town’s library, built in 1897. This architectural reading is not incidental: Nicholson seems to have folded a fragment of the Cornish townscape itself into the shape of a studio object. This resemblance, moreover, is not confined to outline alone: the structural quality is built into the board itself rather than merely suggested by paint. Close inspection reveals a fine network of lines incised into the surface beneath the pigment, a technique Nicholson was experimenting with in this period, working the surface of the board itself rather than relying on paint alone. The bottle is thus not simply depicted but carved into being, its form given the same physical weight Nicholson had long sought when he moved between painting and relief.
Around the bottle, fragments of a Cubist-derived vocabulary persist – passages of dark red and umber, a loose scaffolding of pencilled lines – the legacy of Nicholson’s long engagement with Picasso and Braque, pushed back here to read as shallow architectural space rather than specific setting. Nicholson treats the bottle's form as fixed while allowing colour and plane to shift independently around it, producing a surface at once legibly a bottle and – through its carved structure and the interplay of geometric planes behind it – something closer to architecture rendered in paint.
That the present work was selected by Mr and Mrs Philip J. Goldberg at Gimpel Fils in 1958 is strong evidence of its significance. Their extensive collection of pictures and sculpture was one the Contemporary Art Society thought worth opening to its members for a private viewing in 1963. The picture's later inclusion in Tate Gallery’s major 1993–94 retrospective bears out the Goldbergs’ early judgement, placing it among the artist’s most significant postwar achievements: a small, carved still life that Nicholson himself had built with all the monumental seriousness of his largest works.
The bottle’s curved outline anticipates Nicholson's later depictions of the steeple of the Catholic Church in St Ives, as in December 1951 (St Ives – oval and steeple), while the faceted segmentation of its lower body recalls the turret window of the town’s library, built in 1897. This architectural reading is not incidental: Nicholson seems to have folded a fragment of the Cornish townscape itself into the shape of a studio object. This resemblance, moreover, is not confined to outline alone: the structural quality is built into the board itself rather than merely suggested by paint. Close inspection reveals a fine network of lines incised into the surface beneath the pigment, a technique Nicholson was experimenting with in this period, working the surface of the board itself rather than relying on paint alone. The bottle is thus not simply depicted but carved into being, its form given the same physical weight Nicholson had long sought when he moved between painting and relief.
Around the bottle, fragments of a Cubist-derived vocabulary persist – passages of dark red and umber, a loose scaffolding of pencilled lines – the legacy of Nicholson’s long engagement with Picasso and Braque, pushed back here to read as shallow architectural space rather than specific setting. Nicholson treats the bottle's form as fixed while allowing colour and plane to shift independently around it, producing a surface at once legibly a bottle and – through its carved structure and the interplay of geometric planes behind it – something closer to architecture rendered in paint.
That the present work was selected by Mr and Mrs Philip J. Goldberg at Gimpel Fils in 1958 is strong evidence of its significance. Their extensive collection of pictures and sculpture was one the Contemporary Art Society thought worth opening to its members for a private viewing in 1963. The picture's later inclusion in Tate Gallery’s major 1993–94 retrospective bears out the Goldbergs’ early judgement, placing it among the artist’s most significant postwar achievements: a small, carved still life that Nicholson himself had built with all the monumental seriousness of his largest works.