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.