It’s been more than a hundred years since Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s last show, an injustice belatedly put to right by a fascinating exhibition in the Sussex house where Prydie, as family and friends knew her, lived and painted before the outbreak of the First World War.
Mabel Pryde, a cultural heir of the Scottish Enlightenment, was born in 1871 into a prominent Edinburgh literary and intellectual family. A precociously talented painter, she persuaded her parents to send her south, aged 17, to a well-known art school near London run by the German-born Royal Academician Hubert von Herkomer. There, she met another bright young student, William Nicholson. Five years later, they ran away together to be married.
Acclaimed by contemporary critics as a top-class artist in her own right– compared by reviewers of her 1920 memorial show to Rembrandt and Berthe Morisot – she was eclipsed in the decades after her death by the dazzling successes of her husband as a society portraitist and landscape painter and her son Ben Nicholson as a pioneer abstract artist Like so many talented women in a male world she vanished off the radar into oblivion.
In her case, this was partly because she died quite young. She was struck down by the Spanish ‘flu in 1918, aged 47, leaving only a modest body of work to posterity. Also, she stopped painting for over a decade after her 1893 marriage and the birth of her four children. According to Lucy Davies, co-curator of the show and author of a simultaneously published biographical monograph, she is known to have produced only about 46 paintings, most of which have disappeared without trace.
Still, this summer, she returns to fascinate and shine again at The Grange in Rottingdean, a picturesque seaside village favoured retreat for late Victorian and Edwardian cultural celebrities, including Edward Burne-Jones and Rudyard Kipling. The Grange, her beloved home from 1909 to 1914, is now the village library, museum and art gallery. The hope is that this exhibition may jog memories and bring some of those lost paintings back to light.
The core of the exhibition brings together 17 of her paintings loaned by public and private collections, including the Tate and the National Gallery of Scotland, complemented by a variety of artworks by family and friends, family photograph albums, letters and memorabilia revealing her domestic life and her relationships with fellow artists and intellectuals. Among the memorabilia, her heavy blackened wood palette, etched with her name, takes pride of place.
Many of the paintings date from the years she lived in the house, a particularly fruitful and commercially successful time — with the sale of one painting, she was able to commission the famed architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens (a personal friend) to build her a studio in the garden.
The paintings testify to an engaging, painterly and thought-provoking artist. Intimate interior scenes and portraits were her subject matter, mainly of her family in their home. A stunning Harlequin – probably her daughter Nancy — sparkles and intrigues. In other portraits, Nancy stares sidelong, thoughtfully, out of from a dark background, holding a rabbit, or sits rather sternly in a flowery armchair, observed by a younger brother through a doorway and a receding series of yellow-painted rooms in a composition bringing to mind the style of her Danish contemporary Vilhelm Hammershoi. Yet other paintings capture a soulful Ben in a feathered highland bonnet and a no less soulful pet Pekinese perched on a crimson velvet cushion.
Sadly, Prydie is absent from the current Tate Britain show “Now You See Us,” a comprehensive register of British women artists. This is a strange omission given that, as noted, the Tate is one of the sources for the Rottingdean show.
Prydie: the life and art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson’ at The Grange Gallery, Rottingdean, Sussex, 20 July – 26 August 2024
Biography: Mabel Nicholson by Lucy Davies, Eiderdown Books, published July 2024