Room guide
Gallery 3: Wartime
At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Nicholson and his family left London for Cornwall. He immediately returned to landscape subjects and to memories of his visit to St Ives in 1928.
At the same time Nicholson continued to make uncompromisingly abstract paintings. Indeed, he began to produce numerous versions, in different sizes, of the same composition. The apparent impersonality of these was countered by the gently worked surfaces of the painted reliefs that he made from 1941, which often incorporated colours drawn from his nature.
Towards the end of the war, from 1943, abstract and representational aspects and the continued attention to a painting’s surface quality came together in still lifes on window sills.
Works displayed in this room
- 1939-44 (painted relief)
Oil on board laid on board
Tate. Purchased 1980 - 1939-41 (winter landscape, Halsetown)
Oil and pencil on board
Ferrens Art Gallery: Hull Museums and Art Gallery - 1939 (Halsetown)
Oil and pencil on board
Private Collection - Two Forms 1940-42
Oil on canvas
Southampton City Art Gallery - 1940-3 (two forms)
Oil on canvas
Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru / National Museum of Wales - 1940 (Cornish landscape)
Oil, tempera and pencil on board
On loan from Bolton Museum and Archive Service. Purchased with the assistance of the V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Bradshaw Gas Trust. - 1940 (painted relief - version 1)
Oil on board
Private Collection - 1940 (St Ives)
Oil and pencil on board
Private Collection - 1941 (painting - gouache)
Gouache and pencil on card
Courtesy of Hazlitt Holland - Hibbert - 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall)
Oil and pencil on canvasboard
Tate. Purchased 1945 - 1945 (parrot's eye)
Oil and pencil on board
Private Collection - 1946 (window in Cornwall)
Oil and pencil on canvas
The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester