Seascape (Sea and Sand), 1926

Winifred Nicholson painted Seascape (which is also known as Sea and Sand) while on a holiday in Bamburgh with her husband Ben and the Edes, at a house rented by their mutual friend, the collector Helen Sutherland. Jim Ede’s retrospective account of its making sheds light on Nicholson’s working methods: “I so well remember her bringing back this ‘Seascape’ after her first morning on the sands beyond Bamburgh. It was a windy morning and she had difficulty in holding the wet oil from blowing against her. I had never seen sea treated in this way; so loose, so bold, so unconcerned with detail … That tremendous sky and the rich warmth of sand; and where could she have been in that overwhelming pulsation?” Such speed of execution was indeed typical of the Nicholson’s technique.

Despite being only partially finished, the painting vividly records the extreme weather conditions that the artist found on the beach. Although it was Winifred’s habit to use oil over pencil, the drawing above the horizon was made directly onto the prepared ground and was not painted over. The way in which the forms are filled with colour from the base upwards is somewhat peculiar, as is the curve of the horizon with the sea darkening into a richer brighter blue. The white horses of the breaking waves are painted in heavy impasto as they crash over the pinkish sand at the left.

It seems likely that Jim Ede acquired Seascape soon after it was first shown in London in April 1927. Despite the strength of such a painting – even if partially finished – the critics continued to see Winifred Nicholson’s work in contrast to Ben’s and as specifically feminine. Within these terms, The Observer’s critic P. C. Konody was enthusiastic: “Miss Winifred Nicholson does not carry abstraction nearly as far as Mr Ben Nicholson, and introduces an entrancing note of feminine charm and tenderness into the same class of subjects that Mr. Nicholson treats with rude robustness. She has probably no equal among modern British painters as a colourist of the most exquisite refinement … Miss Nicholson’s art is thoroughly modern, but as free from affectation as from imitation. Everything she paints is the outcome of deep and sincere sympathy with her subject, and bears the stamp of delight in creation.” Such praise was reinforced by sales, and yet the perception of Ben Nicholson’s work as somehow more serious because more difficult (a position held by Jim Ede himself) remained dominant.

Provenance: purchased from the artist by H.S. (Jim) Ede, c. 1927