Christopher Dawson
Head of Department
Lot 42AR
Winifred Nicholson(British, 1893-1981)Arlots 55.3 x 55 cm. (21 3/4 x 21 5/8 in.)
29 September 2021, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£20,000 - £30,000
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Winifred Nicholson (British, 1893-1981)
Arlots
oil on board
55.3 x 55 cm. (21 3/4 x 21 5/8 in.)
Painted circa 1970
oil on board
55.3 x 55 cm. (21 3/4 x 21 5/8 in.)
Painted circa 1970
Footnotes
Provenance
Christopher Hull, thence by family descent
Private Collection, U.K.
Arlots was painted at Kathleen Raine's cottage in Cumbria and depicts flowers from her garden, with the track across a bog leading to her cottage in the middle distance. Winifred Nicholson met the poet Kathleen Raine at the house of her most important collector, Helen Sutherland, in the Lake District in the late 1940s and they became close friends. Drawn together by their love of wild flowers they travelled to the Hebrides in the early 1950s, usually to Sandaig, Gavin Maxwell's cottage, but also Eigg, South Uist and Barra, and while Winifred painted Raine wrote poetry. Largely because she wanted to be close to Nicholson, Raine purchased a cottage near Hallbankgate, Cumberland, as it was then, in the mid-1960s, keeping it until shortly after Winifred Nicholson's death. She spent about a third of her time at Arlots and this was where she wrote her autobiography:
"In Helen's house or with her or through her, I was to meet for the first time many of my most valued friends; David Jones, Hubert and Lelia Howard, Winifred Nicholson, who had also been a child of northern hills. She had loved the same wild flowers as I, seen in the hedges of Cumberland the same cranesbill and harebell, scabious and wateravons as I ... When first I had seen her paintings at an exhibition in London I had wondered how she knew what I thought no one but myself had, in quite that way, seen. When I met her, I understood. From opposite ends of the social scale ... we had shared the same beauty, under the same skies" (The Land Unknown, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1975, p.138).
Winifred Nicholson painted at least two other paintings at Arlots: Rainbow, Arlots (Winifred Nicholson in Cumberland, Jovan Nicholson, Abbot Hall, Kendal, 2016, p.22) and Kathleen's White Geranium (Christie's, 27 September 1991, lot 91).
We are grateful to Jovan Nicholson for compiling this catalogue entry.
