Bathtime

Painted in 1934, during one of the most turbulent and creatively fertile periods of Winifred Nicholson's life, 'Bathtime' captures the domestic intimacy that ran through so much of her work. By this point, Nicholson had separated from her husband Ben and relocated to Paris with her three young children, Jake, Kate, and Andrew, the youngest of whom was only three when the family moved. The painting almost certainly draws from that immediate world of motherhood and daily ritual, subjects she returned to with a warmth and directness that set her apart from the more austere abstraction developing around her in Paris. She was friends with Mondrian, Arp, and Brancusi during these years, yet her own painting remained anchored in observed life, in the textures and light of real rooms and real people.

Nicholson had a remarkable feeling for light, particularly the way it falls across ordinary objects and figures, and her work from the 1930s shows her at her most assured. Where many of her contemporaries were moving away from representation entirely, she found a middle ground, simplifying form and heightening color without losing the human specificity of the moment. A bathtime scene, with its splashing water, soft towels, and wriggling children, would have given her exactly the kind of charged, fleeting domestic subject she loved.