Ben Nicholson O.M.

(British, 1894-1982)

Clark's Hill 46.5 x 56.2 cm. (18 3/8 x 22 1/4 in.) (including the artist's prepared backboard)

Footnotes

Provenance
C.S. Reddihough

Literature
J.P. Hodin, Ben Nicholson, The Meaning of His Art, Alec Tiranti, London, 1957, pl.5 (ill.b&w, as 1930 (Clark's Hill, Cumberland))

The chance discovery of the retired fisherman and artist Alfred Wallis during August 1928 in Back Road West, St. Ives by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood had a lasting impact on both artists. Using ships' paints and discarded pieces of cardboard from his neighbour, a local grocer, his paintings were primitive in style and the finished product was very much governed by the materials he had to hand. Nicholson in particular was impressed by the resourcefulness of Wallis when it came to choosing the supports he painted on and was taken by their primitiveness. As John Russell comments:

BN wrote later of Wallis that he welcomed the irregularities in his pieces of board, "using each shape as the key to the movement in a painting, and using the colour and texture of the board as the key to its colour and texture. When the painting was completed, what remained of the original board, a brown, a grey, a white or a green board, sometimes in the sky, sometimes in the sea, or perhaps in a field or a lighthouse, would be as deeply experienced as the remainder of the painting" (John Russell, Ben Nicholson, drawings paintings and reliefs 1911-1968, Thames and Hudson, London, p.18).

It is no surprise therefore that Clark's Hill, made in 1930, just two years following the meeting of Wallis and Nicholson, has been painted on a rough piece of manufactured panel. The edges, and even the surface, are imperfect and uneven, probably cut intentionally so by the artist rather than just found that way, so the whole support reflects the type of material Wallis so often worked with.

The location of this picture is a farm situated not far from Banks Head, the latter of which was Ben and Winifred Nicholson's Cumberland home from 1924 onwards. They set about renovating the grey stone farmhouse by changing the windows to allow more light in and turning the barn into an artists' studio. By the end of the decade the surrounding hills and farmland featured regularly in his landscapes;

Ben's main output was a series of landscape paintings which by a combination of innocence and austerity are extremely effective at capturing the essence of Winifred's native heath, with its contoured hills and coppices, its meagre dwellings and its grazing livestock...The technique which Ben continued to develop of painting thinly on surfaces on to which he had already applied rough washes, gave these works an extra physical dimension as well as a fragility in the face of nature (Sarah Jane Checkland, Ben Nicholson, The Vicious Circles of his Life and Art, John Murray, London, 2000, pp.82-83).

In the foreground the wide sweeping brushstokes of the green field are used to describe the contours of the earth, in a manner not dissimilar to 1928 (Pill Creek – Cornwall) (see lot 6). These have been applied in a thin wash which allows the rough surface of the panel beneath to bring texture to the work. Beyond this and in contrast, the eye is led into the middle distance where the soft pink of the adjacent field has a thicker impasto giving the picture solidity. The gleaming white farm buildings on the horizon are the focal point, like a beacon of light. The motif of a lone horse, which appears in a number of his landscapes from this period, is naïve in style and complements the simplicity of the golden haystacks. Overall, the rhythm of the undulating fields and hills, along with the softly rendered trees, all point to a poetic quality which infused Nicholson's output at this time and which came to a relatively abrupt halt shortly after Clark's Hill was painted.

The Cumbrian Landscapes have a look of artlessness, but when we examine them more closely the beauty and spontaneity of the touch stand out in their time, and we see what Paul Nash meant when he wrote in 1933 that BN was known to the general public for "a very rare colour sense and an almost magical manipulation of patina". (Op.Cit., p.16).