Nancy Nicholson at Kettle's Yard

Born in 1899, Annie Mary Pryde Nicholson, ‘Nancy’, as she was always known, was the daughter of artists Mabel Pryde (1871 – 1918) and Sir William Nicholson (1872 – 1949). A portrait of her aged about nine-years-old painted by her mother shows Nancy dressed as a harlequin, with a suit covered in red and blue triangles, glossy black shoes, white socks, a black cap, and a boyish hauteur that she retained into adulthood.

Nancy Nicholson married the poet Robert Graves at the age of eighteen but retained her own surname. She illustrated several books of his poems, and designed book jackets for his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The library at Kettle’s Yard holds copies of Graves’ autobiography Good-bye to all that (Jonathan Cape, 1929) as well as his books on T.E. Lawrence, who Kettle’s Yard founder, Jim Ede, knew.

In 1930 Nancy Nicholson set up the Poulk Press at the house in Wiltshire she moved to with her four children and her new partner, Geoffrey Taylor. Poulk specialised in printing by hand, which enabled Nancy to retain complete control over her colours, as well as allowing her to tailor her designs as required. Winifred Nicholson’s portrait of Nancy’s son Sam Graves was painted around this time, and now hangs in the lower extension at Kettle’s Yard.

In April 1932, Nancy Nicholson exhibited her designs at the Room and Book exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery in London. Nicholson’s textile design Penny Fiddle was shown alongside those by other artists, such as Enid Marx, Phyllis Barron, Dorothy Larcher, Serge Chermayeff and her brother Ben Nicholson. The exhibition also included furniture, rugs, ceramics, painting and sculpture, and was notable for the number of women exhibiting in these categories, among them Barbara Hepworth, Frances Hodgkins, Marion Dorn, Gertrude Hermes, Elspeth Little, Evelyn Wyld and Jill Salaman. Ede’s copy of the book that accompanied the exhibition written by Paul Nash is in the Kettle’s Yard archive.

After 1933, Nancy was responsible for the printing of three of Ben Nicholson’s linoblock designs. These were letters and numbers (1933), princess (kings and queens) (c. 1933) and design of rectangles and squares (1933) – significant works that relate both to his growing interest in relief carving, as well as prints on paper.

Nancy Nicholson also printed from designs by Barbara Hepworth at this time, and towards the end of the decade Ben gave his sister his original linoblocks to work from, trusting her skill and judgement on subsequent printings. The blocks for Ben’s princess were given to Kettle’s Yard in 2023.

There are numerous examples of fabrics by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in the Kettle’s Yard collection but a recent gift from the Estate of Angela Verren Taunt included two examples of Ben Nicholson’s letters & numbers design that were printed by Nancy Nicholson. Placed in the attic, the acquisition of these textiles to tell the story of Nancy Nicholson’s creative collaboration with her brother, and bring that room closer to how it looked prior to the building of the extension to Kettle’s Yard in 1970, with cushions in textile designs by Nicholson and Hepworth, as shown in this photograph taken by John Hazelgrove for Ede’s 1984 book A Way of Life.