“Cyclamen and Primula”, Winifred Nicholson, c.1923, Kettle’s Yard.
In the early 1920’s Winifred Nicholson created a series of works which she later described as “sunlight in white paper”. In each, flowers wrapped in tissue paper sit in sunlight on a window ledge with the Alps behind. Winifred had married fellow artist Ben Nicholson in 1920. They spent their winters in Switzerland and their summers in England. In Switzerland, they bought a villa which looked out to the mountains across Lake Lugano. One day, Ben brought her some flowers wrapped in tissue paper and this sparked a series of paintings of flowers in tissue paper of which this one is the best known. Years later, remembering those years, she wrote “the same theme painted itself on that window sill, in cyclamen, primula, or cineraria – sunlight on leaves or sunlight shining transparent through lens and through the mystery of tissue paper. I have often wished for another painting spell like that but never had one.’ After Jim Ede met the Nicholsons in 1924, he began to buy their work, but not this one, yet he always wanted it. In the 1950’s a Cambridge art dealer found it and offered it to him. He described it as “this delight of sunlit shadows and insubstantial substance”. Arguably, Winifred Nicholson returned to to this series again and again in her numbers paintings of flowers over the years. In every life there are moments, good and bad, to which we return again and again for as long as memory still serves. For me, one such moment was the first time I heard the words of Peter with which today’s gospel passage ends: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God”. I hear those words echo so clearly in this work. These painted flowers, seem so small before the vastness of the mountains, yet, and as Winifred Nicholson would agree, capturing vivid colour from pure light. They make the richness of light visible to the human eye. It is similar to the rich matey of the Incarnation, when in one human being, Jesus of Nazareth, the transcendent nature of Godhead was made visible to humankind. As we say of the Lord Jesus in the Apostles’ Creed, he is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God”. Lord to whom shall we go?
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