1943 (Towednack, Cornwall)

1943 (Towednack, Cornwall) dates from a key period during the early 1940s when Nicholson was living in west Cornwall, near St Ives: it is part of a distinct group of compositions showing the sweeping Penwith landscape, depicting farms inland from Carbis Bay and St Ives. The Nicholson family, having resided at a house called Dunluce, described by Nicholson as a ‘wretched little villa’, had moved to a larger house, Chy-an-Kerris, Carbis Bay, in August 1942. Here, at last, both Nicholson and his wife Barbara Hepworth could both have a studio. Peter Khoroche comments, ‘Nicholson did not experience Cornwall only from his bedroom window. He liked nothing better than to escape for a day’s sketching to Halsetown, Towednack, Trendrine or Zennor – names associated with so many of his works, whether drawings, paintings or reliefs, in the following years. At first his range of motifs was limited by wartime restrictions on access to the coastline and by how far he could go on a bicycle’. By 1948 he had a small car and three years later a 1929 MG Midget, which he hand-painted a pale dove grey (P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, pp. 51-52).

'Realism has been abandoned in the search for reality: the principal objective of abstract art is precisely this reality.' – Ben Nicholson

Jeremy Lewison comments on this seminal body of work, ‘The return to landscape was generally to be observed in English painting during the war as Britain reverted to a period of isolation … Paintings of this period were small and rehearse and develop the ideas which he had worked out ... paintings develop the theme of the still life set before a window which Nicholson, along with many other members of the Seven and Five Society, including Winifred Nicholson, had enjoyed during the late twenties ... In such compositions Nicholson was interested in being able to unite objects in the foreground with those in the background, allowing the eye to travel over large distances and periods of time at one glance ... The impact of the landscape on Nicholson's work was considerable. After his move to Cornwall [in 1939] he ceased to make white reliefs, which could be interpreted as an urban art, and reintroduced subdued colours as well as brighter tones which appear to be derived from his surroundings’ (J. Lewison, Ben Nicholson, London, 1991, pp. 19-20).

The present work may well have been seen by Herbert Read in late June 1943 when he and his wife Ludo visited the Nicholsons in Cornwall. Read went on to include the work in his important illustrated monograph on the artist published in 1948. Importantly, the original owner of 1943 (Towednack, Cornwall), was the internationally-acclaimed artist, Peter Lanyon, one of the few Cornish-born painters of the St Ives group, born in St Ives in 1918 and who was 24 years younger than Nicholson. Lanyon was a pupil of Nicholson’s for some months in the early 1940s, receiving ‘a great stimulus’ from him (see N. Lynton, Ben Nicholson, London, 1993, p. 177). In 1944 he wrote to Nicholson asking to purchase one of his works: ‘About the painting of yours. If you can pick me one like the Zennor about £30 I shall be v. much obliged. When and if I get a house of my own one day, it’s not going to have Arnesby Browns and Talmages and things on its walls’ (P. Lanyon letter to B. Nicholson, 1944, quoted in T. Treves, Peter Lanyon: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings and Three-Dimensional Works, London, 2018, p. 59). Nicholson selected 1943 (Towednack, Cornwall).