Winifred Nicholson

(British, 1893-1981)

The Warwick Family 75.4 x 126.7 cm. (29 5/8 x 49 7/8 in.) Painted circa 1925-6

Footnotes

Provenance
C.S. Reddihough

Exhibited
London, Beaux Arts, The Seven and Five Society, 4-22 January 1927, cat.no.29
London, Walker's Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Members of The Campden Hill Club, 14–19 February 1927, cat.no.72
Edinburgh, Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Winifred Nicholson, Paintings 1900-1978, 22 September-28 October 1979, cat.no.14; this exhibition travelled to Carlisle, Art Gallery, 3-24 November, Glasgow, Third Eye Centre, 8-22 December, Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, 6 January-6 February 1980, Colchester, The Minories, 14 February-21 March and Penwith, St. Ives Galleries, 31 March-26 April
London, The Tate Gallery, Winifred Nicholson, 3 June-2 August 1987, cat.no.7 (col.ill., p.45 and ill.b&w, p.77); this exhibition travelled to Newcastle, Laing Art Gallery, 15 August-20 September, Bristol, City Art Gallery, 26 September-1 November, Stoke, City Art Gallery, 7 November-13 December, Aberdeen, City Art Gallery, 9 January-31 January 1988 and Cambridge, Kettle's Yard, 13 February-20 March
Leeds, Leeds Museums and Galleries, Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, Art and Life 1920-1931, 18 October 2013-12 January 2014, unnumbered; this exhibition travelled to Cambridge, Kettle's Yard Gallery, 15 February-11 May and London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 4 June-21 September

Literature
'Artwork, Volume III, No.', March-May, 1927, p.10 (ill.b&w)
Frank Rutter, 'The Seven and Five Society', The Sunday Times, 23 January 1927
Christopher Andreae, Winifred Nicholson, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2009, pl.85, p.99 (col.ill. and illustrated on the back cover)
Jovan Nicholson, Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, Art and Life 1920-1931, Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2013, p.76 (col.ill. p.77)


Almost all of Winifred Nicholson's portraits are of family, friends or people with whom she had a connection. And this intimacy is no less true of The Warwick Family for Tom and Margaret Warwick lived in the farm next door to Winifred Nicholson's house in Cumberland. Sitting with their daughter Janet on the left and their grandson Norman seated on Mrs Warwick's knee and behind them a black range they exude the dignified and reassuring presence of those who work the land. It is also the only known instance of her painting a whole family with three generations as well as being her largest portrait. Not long after the painting was made Janet became nanny to Winifred's children, accompanying the Nicholsons to Cornwall in 1928, and only leaving her service in 1932; she subsequently married a famer, whose motorbike had broken down outside their farm, and moved to Lancashire.

After the Nicholsons moved into Bankshead in the early 1920s, their house in Cumberland, Winifred called on the Warwicks and found Mrs Warwick making a hooky rug, something that Winifred had not previously encountered. Mrs Warwick would have been sitting behind a wooden frame, using a 'proddy' to push strips of material into the hessian ground and surrounded by bags of material, with a coal fire blazing in the range. Hooky rugs are a Northern tradition amongst farmers, a way of reusing discarded clothes and shortening the winter nights. Finished rugs were given pride of place in front of the fire, and the previous year's rug moved to a less prominent position. Naturally farmers' wives tended to make rugs of bulls or sheep that were direct and uncompromising in their design and these rugs made a marked impression on Winifred and Ben Nicholson. Although they were interested in other types of primitive art, Le Douanier Rousseau and African sculpture for example, this was the first time they had come face to face with primitive art being produced (and significantly before they met Alfred Wallis), with the result Ben designed a rug, Animal Squares, which was made by the Warwick's other daughter, Mary Bewick. And later when Winifred actively revived the tradition of hooky rugs in the 1960s overseeing the making of over 100 rugs Mary Bewick and Janet Heap, as she became, were two of her most important makers (see Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920-1931, Philip Wilson Publisher, London, 2013, pp.26, 27, 76 & 77 for more details). Given this background Winifred's portrait of The Warwick Family takes on a deeper significance.

We are grateful to Jovan Nicholson for compiling this catalogue entry.