Duff House Country Gallery, Banff, until 18 January 2004 then touring

WINIFRED NICHOLSON was fascinated by the play of light and colour on the flowers, landscapes and seas of western Scotland, and that fascination is richly reflected in the paintings gathered together for the first time in this themed exhibition.

Cheeky Chicks (1950) by Winifred Nicholson

Nicholson lived mainly in Cumberland, in an old farmhouse on Hadrian’s Wall, but she spent various sketchily-documented periods of time in Scotland, particularly in the Western Isles. Locations which inspired important work include Skye, South Uist, Canna, Eigg, and Gavin Maxwell’s cottage at Sandaig on the Ross-shire mainland.

She is best known for her paintings of flowers, and many of the landscapes she painted in Scotland adopted a characteristic tactic of foregrounding a bright jar of flowers framed in a window, with the greys and muted greens and blues of the landscape stretching away into the distance.

That approach is seen to good effect in canvases like Flodigarry Island, Skye (1949), Loch Hourn (1952), View from Gavin Maxwell’s (1958), and Hebridean Roses, Eigg (1980). Although these works span two decades, they reveal a marked consistency of both concept and execution.

Variations on that theme include the charming Cheeky Chicks (1950), where the flowers compete with three chickens for foreground interest, and Sea Treasures (1952), in which the foregrounded objects are an array of shells and anemones on the beach at Sandaig (her friend, the late poet Kathleen Raine, wrote a poem inspired by the same shells, which is reproduced in the short but informative book by curator Alice Strang that accompanies the exhibition).

In Candle, Eigg (1980), the play of the colour spectrum is reflected through a candle rather than flowers, while the striking The Gate to the Isles (Blue Gate) (1980) is an evocative twist on the theme, with a spiritual overtone (Alice Strang associates it with the “Highland myth in which the souls of the dead go west to the Islands of the Blest, to live in paradise with the gods”).

Several canvases set aside the flowers in favour of a more conventionally framed landscape approach, as in Equinox, Isle of Canna (Canna), Sandaig, and Bonnie Scotland, all from 1951, or Sound of Rum from Bay of Laig, Isle of Eigg (The Singing Sands), which is less certainly dated in the early 1950s.

It is a land (and sea) all but deprived of human presence. The sole exception is The Piper who Played the Retreat at Tobruk (c. 1952), her slightly awkward painting of the shepherd at Sandaig playing his pipes. It is the colour and shape of the land and sea which captured her imagination and drew the best from her brushes, and she revelled in the isolation and primitive amenities of the remote cottages occupied in these trips.

Her bold, flowing brush work and sensitivity to shade and nuances of light are well represented in all of these facets of her landscape style. I saw the exhibition at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh this summer, but it is particularly appropriate that it will be seen at an island location at An Tuireann on the Isle of Skye when its current run at Duff House is over.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2003