5 hours ago
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My friend Rachel Nicholson, who has died aged 91, is known as an artist whose paintings possess rich colour, extraordinary focus and stillness, yet she only began making them in her 40s.
Rachel was born in London, one of triplets born to the artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She, her sister Sarah and her brother Simon spent a childhood shaped by her parents’ need to maintain their own careers. At first they were cared for at a training school for nursery nurses. When the family moved to Cornwall in 1939, first to Carbis Bay and later to nearby St Ives, the children had a nurse, attended a small private school and then, aged 10, became boarders at Dartington school in Devon.
After school, Rachel worked in a variety of secretarial and administrative roles. In 1960 she married the medical scientist Michael Kidd, and they went on to have three children, Jeremy, Alison and Julia.
In 1975, when the youngest of them had settled in school, Rachel began to make paintings. If interviewers later commented that this was the year her mother died, Rachel insisted it was coincidence.
At first she made still lifes. Many depicted the same glass vessels, mugs and jugs that her father had used as motifs, some in turn inherited from Rachel’s grandfather, the artist Sir William Nicholson. She adopted a painstaking intricacy of drawing with the brush, set against abstracted areas of colour.
Her work gained the character of a deeply personal and intimate revision of the artistic language that surrounded her. On inheriting her father’s studio in Hampstead, north London, in 1982 she decided to work there, as if to affirm her utterly individual way of taking on his subjects.
From 1982 she also depicted landscapes and views from interiors, often in and around St Ives. These included views of Porthmeor Beach from her family apartment; and views of the town from friends’ homes and the Tate St Ives cafe. These interiors never included people, conveying an uncanny atmosphere of absence.
While a form of silence reigns in her pictures, music was central to her life. She chose baroque and 20th-century composers when interviewed by Michael Berkeley for BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions in 2015. When the art historian Alan Wilkinson asked about her working environment, she replied “What I want most is a nice quiet peaceful atmosphere ... and to immerse myself in music.”
Michael died in 2012. Rachel is survived by her children, three grandchildren, a great-granddaughter and her sister, Sarah.
