Fig. 1
Mabel Nicholson (1871-1918)
The Red Jersey, c.1912 (detail)
Oil on canvas, 56 x 74cm
Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums: Purchased 1920
The loan by AAGM of The Red Jersey, c.1912 by Mabel Nicholson (1871-1918) to the 2024 exhibition Prydie: The Life and Art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, represented a homecoming for the work. [fig.1] Portraying the artist’s youngest son, Christopher (‘Kit’) Nicholson (1904-48), it was painted whilst she was living at the exhibition venue, The Grange in Rottingdean, between 1909 and 1914. An exploration of The Red Jersey’s journey from the easel to this exhibition allows us to appreciate the painting and its creator in new ways.
Mabel Scott Lauder Pryde (1871-1918) was born in Edinburgh in 1871. She was named after her maternal great-uncle, the Royal Scottish Academician Robert Scott Lauder (1803-1969) and her surname was that of her father, Dr David Pryde (1834-1907), a pioneer of education for girls and young women. She grew up in the Scottish capital in the centre of its artistic, literary and theatrical networks, not least through her brother, the artist James (‘Jimmie’) Pryde (1866-1941).
She met William Nicholson (1872-1949) in 1888, when they were students at Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914)’s art school in Bushey, Hertfordshire. He nicknamed her ‘Prydie’, an affectionate shortening of her surname, more commonly applied to those of boys and men, by which she was known for the rest of her life. On their marriage in 1893, she became Mabel Nicholson and it was under this name that she exhibited her work. She thereafter lived in England, until her death in London in 1918, aged forty-seven and a victim of the Spanish influenza epidemic.
Mabel and William had four children between 1894 and 1904, namely the artist Ben (1894-1982), the soldier Tony (1897-1918), the designer Nancy (1899-1977) and the architect Kit. Nicholson was thereafter faced with combining parental and other domestic responsibilities with creative and professional interests. This she did by ‘viscerally binding’ her children into her practice, as described by Lucy Davies, co-curator of the Prydie exhibition and author of the first monograph about the artist, published by Eiderdown Books in 2024.
As can be seen in The Red Jersey, Nicholson portrayed her children with unsentimental realism, despite or because of her deep attachment to them. She was scrupulous in paying them a modelling fee, as much out of respect for their contribution to her practice as a signifier of her professionalism. Here, Kit regards his mother directly, an expression of forbearance upon his face. The composition is simple and striking: using the dark background often favoured by the artist, the approximately eight-year old child is posed unusually if comfortably against cushions of the same hue, themselves placed upon a mahogany surface just visible along the lower right edge of the canvas. The contrast with the high colour of the titular garment and the sitter’s skin is pronounced, whilst a sensory aspect is introduced in the play of hair and skin between cushion, face and hands.
Fig. 2
Mabel Nicholson with The Red Jersey hanging behind her
Photograph in a Private Collection
The importance of this painting to the artist is proven by the fact that Nicholson not only hung it in pride of place above a mantelpiece in her home, but was photographed standing in front of it. [fig.2] Moreover, as Patricia Reed has pointed out, the artist submitted The Red Jersey for inclusion in the Goupil Gallery Salon in London in October 1912, where, as no.42, it was listed as ‘Kit in Red’. It is thought that the painting was fitted into the frame visible in the photograph and in which it remains, at this point.
Following Nicholson’s death in 1918, Ben and Nancy organised a memorial exhibition of her work, held at the Goupil Gallery in 1920. It was accompanied by a catalogue with a foreword by Nancy’s husband the writer Robert Graves (1895-1985), which listed The Red Jersey as no.12. By this act, her children honoured their mother’s legacy and laid the foundations of her post-humous reputation.
Reviews of the exhibition were fulsome in their praise. The critic of Country Life remarked that after what would now be termed a career break to raise her children, ‘her return to painting seems to have been for her just one more form of expression of mother-love’. The Times review singled out the way that she painted children with ‘an almost fierce sense of their intensity of life, which expresses itself in every stroke of paint without hesitation or misgiving.’
One result of the 1920 exhibition was the acquisition of The Red Jersey from it by Aberdeen Art Gallery. It thus became the first of Nicholson’s works to enter a UK public collection. The Gallery had been established in 1885 with a focus on collecting contemporary art and their purchase began the placing of her within the British, including Scottish, art history canon. The Red Jersey has since become a great favourite within Aberdeen’s collection and an archival installation photograph shows it on display in the Gallery at an unknown date.[fig.3]
Fig. 3
The Red Jersey on display in Aberdeen Art Gallery at an unknown date
Photo courtesy Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums (ref: ag000360_001)
The Red Jersey has delighted visitors since 1920, as well as inspiring creativity in others. For example, the French-Corsican artist Julien de Casabianca (b.1970) featured it in his Outings project as part of the street art festival Nuart Aberdeen 2017. [fig.4] Begun in 2014, Outings is global participatory art initiative intended to embellish the urban environment by bringing famous paintings held by museums and galleries out into the public sphere. As a result, a detail of The Red Jersey was enlarged to a magnificent scale and displayed as a street hoarding. de Casabianca’s cropping of the image centred attention on the psychological pitch of the painting and made it accessible to every passerby.
Fig. 4
Julien de Casabianca, Outings Project, Nuart Aberdeen Street Art Festival, 2017
Photo: © Jaime Rojo
Furthermore, The Red Jersey has provided inspiration for amateurs, not least during the craze for photographic recreations of works of art during the Coronavirus-19 Lockdown of 2020. [fig.5] Realising my own youngest son was akin to Kit as portrayed in the painting, a memorable home-schooling lesson was based on analysing its composition, lighting and connection between sitter and artist and attempting to replicate that for ourselves.
Fig. 5
Recreation of The Red Jersey, during the Coronavirus Lockdown of 2020
Photo: Alice Strang
When The Red Jersey was lent to The Grange in 2024, it meant that the work returned to the home where it was made some 112 years earlier, completing its journey from easel to exhibition. [fig.6] Prydie was the first solo show of Nicholson’s work since the Memorial Exhibition and included several other fine portraits of Kit, including Kit as a Pirate, c.1910 (Private Collection), The Grange, Rottingdean, 1911 (Private Collection on long loan to the National Galleries of Scotland) and Study of a Child, c.1910 (National Galleries of Scotland). This artwork can be viewed by appointment at Aberdeen Treasure Hub.
Fig. 6
The Red Jersey in Prydie: The Life and Art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson 1871-1918, The Grange Gallery, Rottingdean, 20 July – 26 August 2024
Photo: Alice Strang
Alice Strang is an independent Curator and Art Historian and a Senior Specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art at Lyon & Turnbull auctioneers. Whilst a Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, she curated the award-winning exhibition Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885-1965 and edited the accompanying publication. She has researched, written about and exhibited works by the Nicholson family of artists for over twenty years, including the touring exhibition Winifred Nicholson in Scotland, with book of the same title and the national collection display Ben Nicholson and the St Ives School, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
