Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
The Artistic Bloke
By Richard Dorment
William Nicholson
by Sanford Schwartz
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 296 pp., $50.00
In 1896 the publisher William Heinemann commissioned the twenty-four-year-old artist William Nicholson to make a series of woodblock prints called 'An Alphabet.' One of its best-known images, 'A was an Artist,' is a self-portrait of Nicholson dressed as a pavement artist in a workingman's waistcoat and boots, his shirt-sleeves rolled up for a job of work, a bandanna tied loosely around his neck (see illustration on page 24). The image so perfectly embodies our idea of the impoverished artist that we forget how novel such a conception was in England in the 1890s.
Review, 4053 words
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