William Nicholson: Pallant House Gallery, review – It’s clear the artistic patriarch was far from legend’s dullard

The first major exhibition devoted to the artist showcases his talent – and his flaws – in depth

‘Nancy with Feather Hat (The Artist’s Daughter)’, 1910, oil on canvas (Private collection courtesy Richard Green Gallery, London)

Grumpy patriarch is never the best of looks, and certainly not in these identity-obsessed times. William Nicholson begat one of art’s most dynamic dynasties: as father of the leading modernist Ben Nicholson, father-in-law of Barbara Hepworth, arguably the greatest British sculptor of the 20th century, and grandfather and great-grandfather to whole troupes of talented younger artists. Yet far from being celebrated for this inadvertent contribution, old man Nicholson tends to be written off as a charmless reactionary curmudgeon, who produced remarkable illustrations early in his career, but otherwise towed the academic line and was at painful loggerheads with his more far-sighted son.

Interest in the Nicholsons is currently at a high, with Ben’s first wife Winifred’s paintings currently showing at Bath’s Holburne Museum, and William’s own wife Mabel Pryde the focus of a forthcoming show in Cambridge. So this feels a good moment for Pallant House to turn the spotlight on the controversial artist who kicked the whole thing off, with the first major show in over 20 years for what it describes as “one of Modern British art’s most beloved and versatile figures”.

It’s apparent from the show’s first room that far from being the dullard of legend, William Nicholson was a precocious fin-de-siecle dandy, who dipped in and out of many of the cutting-edge tropes of the early 20th-century London avant garde.

Posters and book designs produced with his brother-in-law James Pryde under the name the Beggarstaff Brothers were hugely popular at the time, and have a kind of instant iconic quality even now. The poster Don Quixote (1895) blends the quirky silhouettes of traditional English woodcuts with the Art Nouveau flair of Aubrey Beardsley and Toulouse-Lautrec. An early portrait, Lady in Yellow (1893), believed to show Nicholson’s first wife Mabel, is in fact barely a portrait, more a moody study in subtly varied yellows. The figure seen in profile, tightly cropped by the standards of the time, shows the clear influence of James McNeill Whistler’s quasi-musical ideas about colour and tone, which look forward to the pure abstraction of Mondrian.

Sophisticated stuff. Yet the “versatility” of which the exhibition makes so much – Nicholson’s determination to succeed in all genres (portraits, landscapes, still lifes, theatre design, illustration) – led him to embrace much that was very far from cutting edge. Paintings of rollicking Morris dancers are clunky period pieces. Nicholson’s portraits, the works for which he was best known at the time, are often dully conventional to modern eyes. Two paintings of children, his daughter Nancy in a Feather Hat (1910), and The Little Shopkeeper (1902), showing the daughter of the theatre designer Edward Gordon-Craig playing at shops, were almost brutally realistic by the saccharine standards of the era. Yet they don’t offer the contemporary viewer much beyond a certain pleasant cuteness. By featuring them very prominently, the show dilutes its claims for the proto-modernist qualities of Nicholson’s still lifes and landscapes.

Those still lifes bring a monomanic scrutiny to single objects, viewed against dead black backgrounds. The hyper-real detail on the polished surfaces of lustre-ware bowls and a silver tea caddy often proves to be composed of abstract shapes when you move in close.

Small land and seascapes have a similarly pared-back quality. Mending the Nets, Rottingdean (1909) appears the most rapidly executed, the fishermen dabbed in in a few brief strokes. The glow of the sea and sky is beautifully evoked in luminous silvery greys, bringing to mind the unearthly light of Whistler’s nocturnal views of the Thames. Sunset (1912), with the blazing orb hanging over a shadowed hilltop, is radical, certainly for the time, in its simplicity and in its feel for the bare South Downs landscape – qualities that seem to evoke more feeling in Nicholson than any of his human subjects.

The still life ‘Silver Casket and Red Leather Basket (1920) (Private Collection)

The buildings in Judd’s Farm (1912) are seen as semi-abstract cuboid forms throwing stark shadows over the pale headland and sea, an effect so immediate you can empathise with Nicholson’s recollection quoted alongside, that “the setting was so simple that I could finish it in my head before releasing the paint”. The wall texts insist that Nicholson’s art can’t be divorced from his sense of style and theatricality, as a “dapper dresser” with a massive self-regard – judging from the various portraits of him – who “knew everybody”. So it’s odd and intriguing that he should seem most himself as an artist working on small still lifes that return obsessively to a few familiar objects, or in stripped-back landscapes that veer inescapably towards abstraction.

The feel for a minimal essence in things seen in Nicholson’s most personal works is a quality he shared with his son Ben. Had he been born 30 years later, William Nicholson could have focused on the things that seemed to really matter to him, rather than trying to please all markets as a highly successful Edwardian jack of all art trades. That path was left to his son, a figure from a radically different time and set of circumstances. At loggerheads they may have been, but on this showing at least, Ben Nicholson, the great English modernist, didn’t so much rebel against his stuffy old dad, as carry on exactly where he left off. But that’s often the way it is with fathers and sons.

‘William Nicholson’ is at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, from 22 Nov until 10 May 2026