Casaguba

The present work belongs to a series of three paintings of a house in Castagnola near Lake Lugano, near to the Villa Capriccio which Ben and Winifred Nicholson had bought in 1920. Norbert Lynton (loc. cit.) remarks 'BN took a photograph of the house, and comparing it and the pictures we see how he selected aspects of the subject, altering the proportions of the house and omitting many of its features, as well as greatly simplifying near and far elements of its setting ... 'Casaguba' may be an autumn scene and is full of rich, mostly earthy colours, with the landscape background rising behind the flattened house. Unearthy are the two pale blue lines on the house, one on it's near corner, the other horizontal and marking the floor level between its two storeys. They represent quoins and a string course but here serve as refreshing colour accents'. Comparing this painting and the earlier formal style of his father, Lynton (op. cit., p.439) comments 'BN's challenge to himself to make positive use of colour where his father had made such fine use of tone is clear quite early on, still within his father's range in 1919 [blue bowl in shadow], and wholly outside it already in 1922'.

Jeremy Lewison (Ben Nicholson, Oxford, 1991, p.9) suggests that the work of this period indicates 'a possible Fauve influence ... although the crudeness of the drawing suggests a return to childlike imagery. This latter aspect was symptomatic of his desire to move away from the sophisticated technique he had developed towards the end of the previous decade and which he ultimately found sterile'.