He was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, the son of a handloom weaver. We now know Barrie as a complex character, troubled by an early family tragedy. Nicholson also designed some of the costumes for the play. Barrie (1860–1937) was painted during rehearsals for the first performance of Barrie’s best-known work, Peter Pan or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up which opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in December 1904. This portrait of the famous Scottish playwright and author J.M. Today, from the distance of another century, we can better appreciate the brilliance of his technique and his achievements as one of the finest painters of the Edwardian era. Although he remained independent from most artistic groupings and declined membership of the Royal Academy, Nicholson had many connections in literary and theatrical circles. However, his virtuoso style and devotion to the observed world fell outside the mainstream of modernism and, after his death in 1949, his reputation remained overshadowed by that of his more famous son, the abstract painter Ben Nicholson (see no.79). He first established a reputation as a graphic artist in the 1890s and then for the first forty years or so of the twentieth century he painted an array of portraits, still lifes and landscapes of great beauty and inventiveness. Until relatively recently, the painter Sir William Nicholson was a much underrated figure in the story of British art.
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