The entrance to Stourhead Gardens, Wiltshire, in Autumn

Nicholson's series of interiors painted for Sir Richard Colt Hoare at Stourhead are noted by Mallalieu in British Watercolour Artists as being particularly fine, but he was primarily a painter of landscape who lived for the first thirty years of his life in Yorkshire. He moved to London in 1803, and subsequently made a tour of Scotland with his patron the Marquess of Bute, which provided him with abundant subject matter for subsequent watercolours. Financially succesful, he was a founder member of the Old Watercolour Society.