EQ Nicholson | |
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![]() Self-portrait in wax crayon and coloured ink, about 1943 (detail) | |
Born | Elsie Queen Myers 4 November 1908 London, England |
Died | 7 September 1992 83) London | (aged
Known for | painting, textile design |
Spouse |
EQ Nicholson (4 November 1908 – 7 September 1992) was a British painter and textile designer.
Elsie Queen Myers was born in London on 4 November 1908, the daughter of the novelist Leo Myers and his American-born wife Elsie Mellen Palmer; her sister Eveleen was born in 1910. [1] Her paternal grandparents were the writer Frederic W. H. Myers and the photographer Eveleen Tennant; her maternal grandfather was General William Jackson Palmer of Delaware, from whose wife Mary "Queen" Palmer, née Mellen, she received her second name. [2]
Leo Myers frequented writers and artists including members of the Bloomsbury Group, the sculptor Frank Dobson and the painter Cedric Morris. He committed suicide on 7 April 1944 by taking an overdose of Veronal. [3] : 256 [2]
In 1931, EQ married the architect Christopher "Kit" Nicholson, youngest son of the painters William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, [4] and brother to Ben Nicholson and Nancy Nicholson. During the Second World War EQ and her children lived at first at Yew Cottage on Cranborne Chase in Dorset, [5] : 6 and then, from 1941 until 1947, at Alderholt Mill House, near Fordingbridge in Hampshire. [6] [7] : 59 Kit Nicholson died of injuries following a glider crash in Italy on 28 July 1948. [5] : 11
EQ died in London in 1992. [8]
EQ studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Arts for a few weeks in about 1926, and then spent two years in Paris, where she studied the technique of batik. [9] She later worked as an assistant to the designer Marion Dorn. [10] She also designed rugs. [8] When she was twenty she designed the interior of the new family home at Leckhampton House in Cambridge. [10] [9]
After her marriage, she worked in Nicholson's Modernist architecture practice, where his student and protégé Hugh Casson and his wife Margaret also worked. EQ designed the interiors of Nicholson's building for the London Gliding Club at Dunstable in 1936. [8]
From about 1936 until 1950, EQ worked with her sister-in-law Nancy Nicholson, who had already printed textile designs both for her brother Ben Nicholson and for his wife Barbara Hepworth at her Poulk Press. EQ's designs from this time include Black Goose (1936), Daisy and Seaweed (1949). Some of these designs were later screen-printed by Edinburgh Weavers. [11] : 70 One of her best-known designs is Runner Bean, which dates from about 1950 and was used in Hugh Casson's furnishing of the Royal Yacht [12] and for hand-printed wallpapers by Cole & Son. [8] The archive of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, includes a collection of EQ's drawings and textiles. [13] Some of her designs are still being commercially produced.
For a period of only about fifteen years from about 1941, EQ worked intensely as a painter, in gouache, crayon and collage, in a style that owed something to Georges Braque, whom she greatly admired. She had one show, jointly with Peter Rose Pulham and Keith Vaughan, at the Hanover Gallery in 1950. [8] Works from this period are in the Tate, [14] the New Hall Art Collection [6] and the National Portrait Gallery; [12] they have been compared to those of other artist-designers such as Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. [10]
Events from the year 1992 in art.
Sir William Newzam Prior Nicholson was a British painter of still-life, landscape and portraits. He also worked as a printmaker in techniques including woodcut, wood-engraving and lithography, as an illustrator, as an author of children's books and as a designer for the theatre.
Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson was a British architect, also active as an interior designer, an artist, and a writer and broadcaster on twentieth-century design. He was the director of architecture for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From 1976 to 1984, he was president of the Royal Academy.
Events from the year 1937 in art.
Dorothy Tennant, Lady Stanley was an English painter of the Victorian era neoclassicism. She was married to explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
Leopold Hamilton Myers was a British novelist.
John Christopher "Kit" Wood was an English painter born in Knowsley, near Liverpool.
Events from the year 1908 in art.
Rosa Winifred Nicholson was a British painter. She was married to the painter Ben Nicholson, and was thus the daughter-in-law of the painter William Nicholson and his wife, the painter Mabel Pryde. She was the mother of the painter Kate Nicholson.
Frances Mary Hodgkins was a New Zealand painter chiefly of landscape, and for a short period was a designer of textiles. Born in Dunedin, she was educated Dunedin School of Art, then became an art teacher, earning money to study in England.
Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. He was born in Swansea in South Wales, but worked mainly in East Anglia. As an artist he is best known for his portraits, flower paintings and landscapes.
Elizabeth Joan Glass (1915–2000), was an English textile designer and painter.
Christopher David George "Kit" Nicholson was a British architect and designer. His principal buildings of the 1930s show strong influences of the Rationalist and International Modernist architectural movements.
Désirée Lucienne Lisbeth Dulcie Day OBE RDI FCSD was one of the most influential British textile designers of the 1950s and 1960s. Day drew on inspiration from other arts to develop a new style of abstract pattern-making in post-war British textiles, known as 'Contemporary' design. She was also active in other fields, such as wallpapers, ceramics and carpets.
Enid Crystal Dorothy Marx, RDI, was an English painter and designer, best known for her industrial textile designs for the London Transport Board and the Utility furniture Scheme. Marx was the first female engraver to be designated as a Royal Designer for Industry.
Margaret Casson, Lady Casson was an architect, designer and photographer, and the wife of the architect Hugh Casson.
Eveleen Tennant Myers was an English photographer.
Marion Victoria Dorn also known as Marion Dorn Kauffer was a textile designer primarily in the form of wall hangings, carpeting and rugs, however she is also known to have produced wallpaper, graphics, and illustrations. Known for her significant contributions to modern British interiors in particular for her 'sculpted' carpets, she contributed to some of the best-known interiors of the time including the Savoy Hotel, Claridges, the Orion and the Queen Mary. In the late 1930s and early 1940s she created moquette fabric designs for use in London Transport passenger vehicles.
Althea McNishCM FSCD was an artist from Trinidad who became the first Black British textile designer to earn an international reputation.
Edith Mary Lawrence was a British artist known for her landscape and portrait paintings, her colour linocuts and her textile designs.