Lot Essay
Nicholson wrote "In August 1928 went for the day to St. Ives with Kit Wood: this was an exciting day, for not only was it the first time I saw St. Ives, but on the way back from Porthmeor Beach we passed an open door in Back Road West...We knocked on the door and inside found Wallis." (Exhibition catalogue, A Tribute to Ben Nicholson, London 1974).
Thus started Nicholson's association with St. Ives. With the outbreak of War, when art-life in London came to a halt, Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth moved to this area accepting hospitality offered by Adrian Stokes. "The landscape, and the little town itself, suited him ideally. The light still seems to him as fine as any in the world. The interplay of land and sea inexhaustibly beautiful, the prehistoric movements commandingly strange, and the whole scale and pace of life very well attuned to his activity. Before long he had bicycled every yard of the coastline." (John Russell, Ben Nicholson, Drawings, Paintings and Reliefs 1911-1968, London, 1969, pp. 31-32).
This change of environment had an immediate effect on his work and he started to paint numerous works of landscape again.
"The straight line of the sea-bordered horizon, the sailboats putting out from harbour, the way a stone wall at once defined and fought against the line of a hill, and a glimpse of blue water between rooftops - these were the données which Nicholson marshalled as deftly as, two or three years earlier, he had marshalled his zones, flat and thin to the point of immateriality, of pure colour." "...When he touched in the landscape with a brush, the result had a considered freshness, a look of fresh herbs and coinage new from mint, which were nearer to Mondrian than to the weather-beaten approximations of our native school. When he put the rooftops of St. Ives in the foreground they looked, almost, like an irregular, rhomboidal relief; but the harbour-scape behind them had a crystalline precision which did not exclude evidence of deep feeling and affectionate close scrutiny." (Russell, op. cit., p. 31).
In 1950 he separated from Hepworth and moved to a house called "Trezion" in Salubrious Place, which was located above the Zion Congregational Church, overlooking the St. Ives harbour.
There is a similar work executed on 20 Oct. 1951, which was exhibited in Ben Nicholson, Fifty Years of His Art, Buffalo, New York, 1978-1979.
Thus started Nicholson's association with St. Ives. With the outbreak of War, when art-life in London came to a halt, Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth moved to this area accepting hospitality offered by Adrian Stokes. "The landscape, and the little town itself, suited him ideally. The light still seems to him as fine as any in the world. The interplay of land and sea inexhaustibly beautiful, the prehistoric movements commandingly strange, and the whole scale and pace of life very well attuned to his activity. Before long he had bicycled every yard of the coastline." (John Russell, Ben Nicholson, Drawings, Paintings and Reliefs 1911-1968, London, 1969, pp. 31-32).
This change of environment had an immediate effect on his work and he started to paint numerous works of landscape again.
"The straight line of the sea-bordered horizon, the sailboats putting out from harbour, the way a stone wall at once defined and fought against the line of a hill, and a glimpse of blue water between rooftops - these were the données which Nicholson marshalled as deftly as, two or three years earlier, he had marshalled his zones, flat and thin to the point of immateriality, of pure colour." "...When he touched in the landscape with a brush, the result had a considered freshness, a look of fresh herbs and coinage new from mint, which were nearer to Mondrian than to the weather-beaten approximations of our native school. When he put the rooftops of St. Ives in the foreground they looked, almost, like an irregular, rhomboidal relief; but the harbour-scape behind them had a crystalline precision which did not exclude evidence of deep feeling and affectionate close scrutiny." (Russell, op. cit., p. 31).
In 1950 he separated from Hepworth and moved to a house called "Trezion" in Salubrious Place, which was located above the Zion Congregational Church, overlooking the St. Ives harbour.
There is a similar work executed on 20 Oct. 1951, which was exhibited in Ben Nicholson, Fifty Years of His Art, Buffalo, New York, 1978-1979.