Just Flowers

‘Lively’ and ‘animated’ are not normally words associated with still life, but here they seem appropriate for both the composition and the handling of paint. A quantity of early summer flowers, white with a note of yellow, are spilling out of a glass goblet: foxglove, nicotiana, baby’s breath, sweet william, and perhaps honeysuckle can be identified. The flowers appear to be bursting out of the top of the picture space – cropped at the upper edge, while a bent stem of grass extends down to the table, linking up with the raffia which dances around the foreground. One of Nicholson’s favourite devices in this period is to show the stems of flowers in a vase glass with the refraction of the paper on which the vase sits. Here the glass is tinted rather than clear with a note of blue. There is a subtle distinction between the right and left side of the canvas. On the viewer’s right the paper is in double folds, there is a single strand of raffia and the white background is smoothly painted. On the left the paper is crumpled, the raffia is in disorder and short directional brush strokes animate the background. There is a sense of urgency about the painting. Flowers and leaves have been executed with rapid brush strokes and ample use has been made of sgraffito – scraping through the thick, glossy paint with the brush end. Mainly leaves and stems are outlined in this way but in some places, such as upper centre and right, energetic squiggles can be seen.

It would perhaps be more accurately to describe the raffia as ‘bass’. Bass derives from basta, a Russian word for the inner bark of the lime or linden tree. This has more rigidity and strength than raffia and was used to tie up bunches of flowers, or vegetables in this period. Despite, or perhaps because of, its highly successful use here Nicholson does not seem to have included it in other still-lifes.

P.R.