good condtion.
Signed, titled and dated on the center on the verso.
Faint brownish stain on the center.
Light staining along the edges of the paper.
Several small abrasion marks (possibly scraping) on the lower center of the paper.

Ben NICHOLSON (1894–1982) was a leading figure in the development of abstract art in twentieth-century Britain. The eldest son of the painter William NICHOLSON and the printmaker Mabel PRYDE, he studied briefly at the Slade School of Fine Art before setting out on a path of his own. In 1928, he encountered the self-taught naïve painter and former fisherman Alfred WALLIS in St Ives, whose unpretentious approach to form had a profound influence on him. In the 1930s he visited PICASSO's studio in Paris and, through the group Abstraction-Création, associated with MONDRIAN, ARP and others, moving towards abstraction under the influence of Cubism and Neo-Plasticism. His White Reliefs, carved boards of circles and rectangles rendered entirely in white, established his international reputation as a major figure of British abstract art. In 1939, he moved to St Ives with Barbara HEPWORTH, becoming a central figure of the St Ives School and helping transform the town into a centre for the post-war avant-garde. After the war, he further developed a style that fused still life and landscape with geometric composition. Following a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1955, he was awarded the first Guggenheim International Painting Prize in 1956 and the painting prize at the São Paulo Bienal in 1957, and in 1968 he received the Order of Merit.

This work was painted in 1981, the year before NICHOLSON's death, at his home in London, making it one of his final works. The title refers to Castagnola, a village on the shores of Lake Lugano in southern Switzerland. NICHOLSON spent winters there with his first wife, Winifred, in the 1920s, marking the starting point of his career as a painter, and returned to live there from 1958 to 1971, during which time he established his international reputation. For NICHOLSON, titles drawn from place names were not records of actual views, but attempts to preserve the experience and memory of a place within the picture. This work can likewise be understood as an image of a memory evoked in London, ten years after he left the lakeside. Pitchers, mugs and goblets rendered in fine outlines overlap and appear translucent, dissolving into a flattened composition. The pale grey ground and the dark grey band running horizontally along the upper edge allow the still life on a tabletop to be read simultaneously as a landscape of lake and mountains. Handled by Waddington Galleries and Annely Juda Fine Art in London before passing to Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo, the work is recorded as No. 425 in Norbert Lynton's Ben Nicholson.

Waddington Galleries Ltd, London / Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Ben Nicholson (Norbert Lynton) no. 425