Other Artist's Sites:

 

 

William Nicholson - Printmaker
 

by Goldmark Gallery (29 Sep 2005)


William Nicholson is known to have produced a political cartoon for his father, who was a Member of Parliament, in the late 1880s and also a woodcut after his return from Paris in 1890 but neither of these images seem to have survived. His earliest extant woodcut, Primrose Hill Farm, Ruislip dates from 1893 and depicts the place where Nicholson spent his honeymoon. Nicholson produced something over 200 graphic works during the next half century but approximately three quarters of these were made before 1914.

In 1897 Nicholson made a woodcut of Queen Victoria, which greatly helped to establish his name with the general public. During the same year he worked upon An Illustrated Alphabet for the publisher William Heinemann which, although reasonably successful financially, was probably more important in providing Nicholson with an opportunity to develop his talents as an engraver. The following year Nicholson made two further series of prints for Heinemann entitled respectively An Almanac of Twelve Sports and London Types.

Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of Nicholson's woodcuts was that he often employed the side of the woodblock rather than the end grain. His images, particularly his portraits, were regularly set boldly against almost completely blank backgrounds. This characteristic can be seen in the well-known portraits of Queen Victoria, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Roberts, Sarah Bernhardt and others.

During the 1890s Nicholson in conjunction with his brother-in-law, the artist James Pryde, designed a large number of posters under the joint name of J. & W.Beggarstaff. These posters were clearly influenced by those Nicholson had seen in France for example the pioneering colour lithographic posters of Jules Cheret.

After about 1900 Nicholson felt sufficiently financially secure to concentrate more on painting than on graphic work. However in the latter field some of his better-known work was for book illustration, for example Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy [1921] for the Medici Society and Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon [1929].