Flowers

Winifred Nicholson spent a lifetime looking hard at flowers, and this painting belongs to one of her most characteristic and beloved subjects. Born into an aristocratic family with deep connections to the Pre-Raphaelites through her grandfather George Howard, she trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art before building a career as one of Britain's most quietly radical painters. Flowers were never just decorative for her. She was obsessed with light, particularly the way it filters through petals and diffracts into colour at windowsills, and she often placed blooms against window glass to catch that luminous, almost spiritual effect. She spoke about colour with near-mystical conviction, influenced in part by her Christian Science faith, believing that colour carried emotional and transcendent meaning beyond simple representation.

Nicholson's still-lifes sit apart from the cool geometry associated with her ex-husband Ben Nicholson. Where his work turned inward and abstract, hers stayed warm, sensory, and rooted in the observed world. She was friends in Paris with Mondrian and Arp, and that company sharpened her eye without hardening her palette. The result, in works like this one, is painting that feels both intimate and luminous, ordinary flowers rendered with an almost visionary intensity. That this work is held at Girton College is fitting: Girton was one of the first Cambridge colleges to admit women, and Nicholson herself came from a line of politically active women, her grandmother Rosalind Howard being a prominent activist.