Benjamin Lauder Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 at Denham, Buckinghamshire. He was the son of the artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. The family moved to London in 1896 and Nicholson was educated as a boarder at Gresham’s School at Holt in Norfolk. He studied at the Slade 1910-11 and spent the years 1912-14 in France and Italy. He travelled to New York in 1917 for an operation on his tonsils, then visited other American cities, returning to England in 1918. Nicholson’s earliest paintings were still lifes influenced by the work of his father. He first exhibited in 1919, at the Grosvenor Gallery and Grafton Galleries. His first one-man show was held at the Twenty-one Gallery, London in 1924. He married the artist Winifred Roberts in 1920. Living in London, over the next three years they overwintered in Lugano, Switzerland and divided their time between London and Cumberland. In 1923 the couple purchased ‘Banks Head’, a 17th-century farmhouse built over a mile castle on Hadrian’s Wall. In the 1920s Nicholson began painting figurative and abstract works inspired by Post Impressionism and Synthetic Cubism, and later by the primitive style of Rousseau. From 1924 to 1935 he was a member of the Seven and Five Society, and in 1933 he joined Paul Nash’s Unit One and produced his first geometric and abstract reliefs. In 1937 Nicholson, Naum Gabo and the architect Leslie Martin edited Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. The Circle was the first monograph on constructivist art. It laid down the guidelines and principles of the modern movement, and was to become a landmark influence on the thinking of art historians. It identified Nicholson with a group of like-minded artists and architects who wanted to apply ‘constructivist’ principles to public and private art, advocating mathematical precision, clean lines and an absence of ornament. In 1931, Nicholson’s relationship with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth resulted in the breakdown of his marriage. He lived in London from 1932 to 1939, making several trips to Paris in 1932-33, visiting Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). Nicholson and Hepworth married in 1938. On visits to Paris, he met Mondrian, whose work in the neoplastic style was to influence him in an abstract direction, and Picasso, whose Cubism would also find its way into his work. His gift, however, was the ability to incorporate these European trends into a new style that was recognisably his own. He first visited St Ives, Cornwall in 1928 with the painter Christopher Wood, where he met the fisherman and naïve painter, Alfred Wallis (1855-1942). In Paris in 1933, he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which contained only right angles and circles. In 1937 he was one of the editors of Circle, an influential monograph on constructivism. He believed that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public, as shown by the Nicholson Wall, a mural he created for the garden of Sutton Place in Guildford, Surrey. In 1939 he moved to Cornwall and there, he produced landscapes and abstract art. In 1943 he joined the St Ives Society of Artists. Having divorced from Hepworth in 1951, Nicholson married the photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 and moved to Castagnola, Switzerland in 1958. In 1952 Nicholson won first prize at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh. He was awarded the first Guggenheim International painting prize in 1956, and the international prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1957. Numerous retrospective exhibitions of Nicholson’s work were held, including shows at the Venice Biennale and Tate Gallery in 1954-5, Kunsthalle, Berne in 1961, Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas in 1964, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 1978, and Tate Gallery in 1993-94. Helped by wide international exposure in British Council tours during the 1940s and 1950s and by the championing of the writer Herbert Read, Nicholson’s work came to be seen, with Henry Moore’s, as the quintessence of British Modernism. In 1968 he was appointed by his sovereign to the Order of Merit. In 1971 he separated from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977 he divorced. He died in London on 6 February 1982 and was cremated at Golders Green. Some of his works may be seen at the Tate St Ives Gallery, and at Kettle’s Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge. In 1976 art historian Professor Norbert Lynton published a detailed consideration of Nicholson’s life and work in his book Ben Nicholson.