Nicholson’s work in Italy, although closely related to the central concerns of his art, is a special category in his oeuvre, which demonstrates his appreciation of Italian architecture and landscape. He visited Italy in 1950 and this was his first trip to the country since the end of the Second World War. Nicholson produced various drawings of some of his most favourite views throughout Italy – the regions of Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. Peter Khoroche has commented that, “laying no claim to a technical or historical knowledge of architecture, what interested him was the shape, the proportion, the lie of a building…Building, like objects, were a starting point only, naturally there was no point in mere imitation…Architecture in landscape offered an opportunity to combine his love of precise structure with his feeling of poetry and acute sensitivity to the spirit of place”.

The Leger Galleries, London
Private collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel, London