Candle at a Window

Winifred Nicholson, née Roberts, was born in Oxford in 1893, granddaughter to George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, himself a painter and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. She attended Byam Shaw School of Art and studied in Paris, before meeting and marrying Ben Nicholson in 1920.

For the first three years of their marriage they divided their time between England and Switzerland, before purchasing Banks Head in Cumbria in 1923. The influence of Winifred’s explorations into the vibrations of light and colour can be seen in the works of Ben Nicholson from this period (“from Winifred I learned so much about colour” he once said).

When not at Banks Head, where she lived on and off for the rest of her life, Winifred Nicholson travelled. After having lived in Paris for much of the 1930s, she returned to Cumbria at the outbreak of war. There then followed painting excursions to the Hebrides, St Ives, Morocco, Tunisia and Greece. All the time she was seeking to unearth the secrets of colour, the hues that “only show themselves under the right conditions, and only to certain eyes at certain times”.