Landscape with Sheep

Winifred Nicholson painted this in 1960, when she was in her late sixties and long settled into the rhythms of rural Cumbria. She had bought Bankshead, a farmhouse on Hadrian's Wall near Brampton, back in 1924, and the northern landscape became one of her great subjects across decades of work. Sheep dotting the fields of Cumberland were as familiar to her as the light coming through a windowpane onto a vase of flowers, her other great preoccupation. By this point she had long moved on from the flirtations with abstraction she had made in Paris during the 1930s, where she had known Mondrian and Brancusi, and returned to direct observation of the natural world.

Nicholson had an unusually sensitive feel for light, particularly the soft, shifting quality you get in the north of England where weather moves fast and the sky does a lot of work. Her landscapes tend to feel luminous rather than literal, with colour carrying mood as much as description. Coming from a family steeped in art (her grandfather painted with the Pre-Raphaelites, her husband was Ben Nicholson, her mother-in-law Mabel Pryde), she developed a voice that was genuinely her own: quieter than the modernist scene around her, more lyrical, rooted in place and season.