In these characteristic Nicholson pictures, the indoor and the outdoor are inseparable. Window panes and bars are often eliminated entirely. The artist seems to be looking outward and inward simultaneously. She has discovered a telling visual metaphor for the act of seeing, its objectivity and subjectivity inextricably linked. The world you see through her eyes is recognisable but how she presents it in the remarkable alchemy of her brushstroke and pigment makes you see it differently. And once seen, it remains potently in the memory. Given the visionary power and poetry of her flower paintings, her statement that to her flowers 'are the secret of the cosmos' is perhaps not so grandiose or high-flown as might be first thought.

Luminosity, open space and quick movements characterise Winifred Nicholson's paintings.Flowers on windowsills are a favourite subject,not only for their intrinsic beauty, or even their personalities, but above all for their living, translucent colour. The ways in which light divides into atmospheric rainbow colours was a matter of childlike wonder to the artist throughout her long career.

This book shows Winifred Nicholson as much more than a 'flower painter'. She managed an unusually creative balance between motherhood and painting,her children becoming subjects - as did her husband,the artist Ben Nicholson. Too often given a cursory mention as his first wife, Winifred Nicholson warrants independent recognition for the striking originality of her own work.

Born in 1893 into the aristocratic Howard family,Winifred emerged as a ground-breaking painter in the 1920s, experimenting alongside Ben Nicholson.In 1930s Paris she investigated abstraction. After the Second World War she continued to paint the world immediately around her - in her native Cumberland and on many painting trips abroard. She painted Greek landscapes as settings for imagined Greek myths. Love of sunlight was joined by a sensitive affection for moonlight. In her final decade she discovered, by using prisms, ways of interweaving the abstractness of spectrum colours with the reality of flower and landscape.

Drawing on Winifred's extensive correspondence, and reproducing many previously unpublished paintings,this exciting book offers a fresh and rounded view of Winifred Nicholson's life and art.

Chronology

Introduction

1 Childhood Beginnings, 1893-1911

2 Art School/Passage to India, 1912-20

3 A Painter Man, 1920-23

4 Moves, 1923-5

5 Growing Recognition, 1926-8

6 Relationships, 1929-31

7 Paris, 1932-7

8 Return, 1938-50

9 More Firsts, 1951-66

10 Explorations, 1967-81

Postscript

Notes

Public Collections

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits