Winifred Nicholson’s late period at Bankshead was a remarkable culmination of a lifetime’s creativity, even if to begin with there was a certain hesitancy. Surprisingly, there are few Cumberland paintings dating from the early sixties which suggests Winifred was going through a period of readjustment.41 Presumably this was partly the problem of acclimatising to life without her father,42 and there were also distractions at Bankshead, now lived in by her eldest son’s family. It cannot have been easy trying to paint with two mischievous toddler grandchildren sharing the house, for when painting she liked to concentrate intently without interruptions. Throughout her career Winifred regularly enjoyed solo shows in London, but there were none in the decade from 1954. When eventually she had a London exhibition in 1964 she showed exclusively Greek paintings. During the 1960s Winifred made regular trips to Greece, often staying for several months, where she delighted in the hospitality, culture, light and a sense of history, all of which made for conducive conditions for painting. Also, in the spring it was generally warmer than Cumberland and at that time cheaper too. But there was another reason why Winifred enjoyed her travels so much and that was ‘if one goes away one sees things with a fresh eye and I certainly feel a great zest for painting right now’.43 One of the considerations for discussing Winifred’s love of Cumberland is that while she was an excellent writer, both about her painting and the places she enjoyed on her travels, she rarely wrote at length about Cumberland in her articles or letters. Presumably this was because her correspondents knew exactly how she felt about her home county and as a consequence her remarks tended to be short comments: ‘the snowdrops are out and the grey winds make one loath to leave Cumberland, but I expect it will be nice to see London’.44 It is also instructive to see how little she painted in Northumberland or immediately across the border in Scotland,45 aside from her more far flung travels, restricting herself almost exclusively to Cumberland.
Moonlight, Pots Loan, 1978 Oil on canvas 49 x 59.7 cm Private Collection
There were other challenges living in Cumberland. At times it was difficult to find good quality paints and she often relied on Ben to send her some from Switzerland: Some lovely Blockx paints arrived. I was so very delighted to see them and they are all the colours that I use and all those that I have had I have used up. …[Kate says] they are so much too bright she has to ‘tone them down’ to go with her English paints. But never too bright for me, nor too luminous, nor too glowing in this grey misty November Cumberland.46 There were difficulties, too, with framers and while in the 1920s she often used the Chelsea arts store, living in Cumberland after the war she resorted to having frames made by Grays, the local undertakers in Carlisle. When circumstances allowed Winifred took great care over the frames, often painting them a specific colour to blend in with the painting; for example, each individual frame for Blue Septagons, Inward and Outward, and Pic St. Loup, all painted in France in the 1930s, is painted a subtly different shade of grey to blend with the different colour harmonies of each picture. At the end of her life she was delighted to find a good local joiner in Alan Harvey, and enjoyed choosing special woods with him for particular paintings; many of her prismatic paintings were framed by him.
Snowdrops and Aconites, 1970s Oil on canvas 40.6 x 45.7 cm Private Collection
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Perhaps her greatest challenge was the lack of stimulation or advice from kindred spirits: ‘I sometimes get “stuck” up here, my own fault I know, but I do want to get really down to some ideas that are heaving for release’.47 She engaged in a dialogue with Ben about who to show her paintings to complaining at one moment that ‘no one sees what I do up here, so I don’t really know but I don’t mind that at all’.48 Later she was more assertive remarking that
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