William Nicholson had a terrible Great War. At 53, he was too old to be conscripted. But he lost his wife, Mabel, to the influenza pandemic in July 1918. And three months later, his son Tony died in action, only 37 days before the fighting ended. So it’s no surprise that Nicholson’s 1918 painting Armistice Night, invoking one of the wildest celebrations in British history, is rendered in deep blacks and a sickly sepia.
Successful and well connected in his lifetime—Nicholson was born in 1872, knighted in 1936, and died in 1949—the man has receded into a shadowy hinterland of British art: the era positioned between late Victorianism, with its stags at bay and Arthurian heraldry, and the modernism that began to take hold after the end of the First World War.
