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Ensayo del lote
Pink Camellias was painted at an important moment in William Nicholson's career. In 1934, he was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery, and two years later he would receive a knighthood. Around this time, he also gave statesman and amateur painter Winston Churchill private instruction in his technique, advice that Churchill would later say taught him more about painting than anyone else. Exhibited that same year at the Leicester Galleries, the present work belongs to this period of significant institutional recognition.
The mid-1930s were also a period of personal transition for Nicholson. The panel's reverse is inscribed with his studio address at the time, 11 Apple Tree Yard, St James, where much of that change took place. His marriage to his second wife, Edith Stuart-Wortley, had by this point effectively drawn to a close, though the two would remain on cordial terms; it would be another year before he began his long companionship with the writer Marguerite Steen, whom he would in time bring to this very studio. The inscription thus marks more than a working address: it locates Pink Camellias at a quiet, private turning point between two chapters of the artist's life.
The composition is economical yet confident. A loose bunch of pink camellias, their petals built from soft strokes rather than laboured detail, rises from a glass vase set against a deep red ground and a white cloth. Nicholson’s handling of the glass is especially fine, its transparency suggested through a few deft passages of tone and reflected light, rather than forced description. The palette is equally assured, its pinks and reds pitched against cool greys, whites and greens, each colour weighed precisely against its neighbour.
This lightness of hand points to a broader shift in Nicholson's working method at this date. As Patricia Reed has observed, a sketch presented by the artist to Ada Pringle appears to be a preparatory study for the present composition rather than a record made after the fact: evidence that Nicholson was, at this point, making use of preliminary drawings to refine his ideas, a practice which ran contrary to his usual method of working directly on the panel (P. Reed, William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London, 2011, p. 558). Once the composition was resolved on paper, Nicholson could paint with real assurance, as he does in the present work, its brushwork retaining all the spontaneity of a sketch even as the design beneath it had been carefully planned.
Pink Camellias was later exhibited in the celebrated joint exhibition of Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats, held at the National Gallery in the first months of 1942. This was one of a series of wartime shows conceived by the dealer and art historian Lillian Browse, who persuaded Kenneth Clark to open the gallery's empty rooms to contemporary British art while its permanent collection sat safely in Wales. Browse would later write the first monograph on Nicholson's work, published in 1956. Seen by over ten thousand visitors during the depths of the war, this exhibition has since come to be regarded as a landmark moment in both artists' critical reception. There is something quietly fitting about an unguarded picture of flowers – painted in a moment of private calm – hanging in wartime London as a small assertion of colour and beauty against the surrounding darkness.
The mid-1930s were also a period of personal transition for Nicholson. The panel's reverse is inscribed with his studio address at the time, 11 Apple Tree Yard, St James, where much of that change took place. His marriage to his second wife, Edith Stuart-Wortley, had by this point effectively drawn to a close, though the two would remain on cordial terms; it would be another year before he began his long companionship with the writer Marguerite Steen, whom he would in time bring to this very studio. The inscription thus marks more than a working address: it locates Pink Camellias at a quiet, private turning point between two chapters of the artist's life.
The composition is economical yet confident. A loose bunch of pink camellias, their petals built from soft strokes rather than laboured detail, rises from a glass vase set against a deep red ground and a white cloth. Nicholson’s handling of the glass is especially fine, its transparency suggested through a few deft passages of tone and reflected light, rather than forced description. The palette is equally assured, its pinks and reds pitched against cool greys, whites and greens, each colour weighed precisely against its neighbour.
This lightness of hand points to a broader shift in Nicholson's working method at this date. As Patricia Reed has observed, a sketch presented by the artist to Ada Pringle appears to be a preparatory study for the present composition rather than a record made after the fact: evidence that Nicholson was, at this point, making use of preliminary drawings to refine his ideas, a practice which ran contrary to his usual method of working directly on the panel (P. Reed, William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London, 2011, p. 558). Once the composition was resolved on paper, Nicholson could paint with real assurance, as he does in the present work, its brushwork retaining all the spontaneity of a sketch even as the design beneath it had been carefully planned.
Pink Camellias was later exhibited in the celebrated joint exhibition of Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats, held at the National Gallery in the first months of 1942. This was one of a series of wartime shows conceived by the dealer and art historian Lillian Browse, who persuaded Kenneth Clark to open the gallery's empty rooms to contemporary British art while its permanent collection sat safely in Wales. Browse would later write the first monograph on Nicholson's work, published in 1956. Seen by over ten thousand visitors during the depths of the war, this exhibition has since come to be regarded as a landmark moment in both artists' critical reception. There is something quietly fitting about an unguarded picture of flowers – painted in a moment of private calm – hanging in wartime London as a small assertion of colour and beauty against the surrounding darkness.