Winifred Roberts was born in 21 December 1893 at Oxford. Her parents were Charles Roberts, a Liberal Party politician, ex-academic and (through his wife) landowner, and Lady Cecilia Dacre, daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. George Howard was an accomplished painter as well as a friend and patron of many distinguished painters, including the Pre-Raphaelites. Lady Cecilia was an amateur watercolourist and Winifred began painting with Howard at around the age of eleven. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London (1919-20) and in 1920, travelled in India where her father was Under Secretary of State. There, she noticed ‘how eastern art uses lilac to create sunlight’. The bright light of India made her conscious that the sun is the source of all light and therefore the source of all colour, and she began to ponder deeply on the art of colour. In her article ‘Unknown Colour’, published in Circle in 1937, she wrote that ‘Colour … was used as melody by the Easterns’ and this phrase revealed her long held belief that music and colour are related abstract disciplines. In 1920 she married artist Ben Nicholson. In the 1920s, she established herself as a talented flower painter and was spoken of as ‘the female Van Gogh’. They travelled extensively and their first home was near Castagnola in Switzerland. They also worked and lived in England and visited Paris frequently. They were involved with an influential artistic circle in Paris. In 1924 the couple moved into a 17th century farmhouse near Hadrian’s Wall, in Cumbria, which Winifred kept until the end of her life. One of the couple’s closest friends was the artist Christopher Wood, whom they had met in 1926. Winifred exhibited regularly during the 1920s and became a well-respected artist. She was also involved in the wider movement of abstract art in London, which was largely dependent on their acquaintances and friends in Paris. There was a lively interaction between artists in London and Paris at this stage. Winifred and Ben Nicholson were central to the movement. She managed an unusually creative balance between motherhood and painting, her children becoming subjects – as did her husband. She exhibited with her husband at the Paterson Gallery in 1923. The spiritual dimension of her work was recognised in a review in The Times of 6 July 1928, declaring: ‘Genius is not a word to be used lightly, but – on the understanding that it applies to aptitude rather than to actual performance – it is the only word for Mrs Winifred Nicholson as a flower painter. She has an uncanny sense of flowers, of what they are behind their shapes and colours, as emanations of earth, and her technical methods are right.’ Although she painted less in the abstract style than in the representational, she experimented with her own form of abstraction. Christopher Wood fell under a train and was killed in 1930 and Ben Nicholson walked out on his wife and three children the following year, going to live with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Winifred took her children to Paris in 1932, where she took an apartment and stayed for six years. During that time, she consolidated her friendships with leading artists of European Modernism: Jean Hélion, Cesar Domela, Hans and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Hugo, Georges Braque, Hans Hartung, and Constantin Brancusi. After her divorce from Nicholson in 1938, Winifred spent most of the rest of her long life in Cumberland, at Boothby and at Bankshead, near Lanercost. She painted prolifically throughout her life, largely at home but also on trips to Greece and Scotland, among other places. She was a member of the 7 & 5 Society (1925-35) and the NEAC (1937-43). After a remarkable early career at the centre of the modern movement, Winifred continued to exhibit and to paint flowers and landscapes with a sensitivity and spirituality. The small seascapes she painted in Scotland epitomise her preoccupations with atmospheric conditions, with water, light and colour. Winifred Nicholson died in Cumbria in 1981. Her great friend, the poet Kathleen Raine has described Winifred’s spirituality as a living essence of the present moment; ‘to that moment she brought the whole of herself to meet whatever epiphany was present before her eyes, as a gift, as it were, from the ever-flowing world.’ The first exhibition to fully survey the work of Winifred Nicholson was staged by the Tate Gallery in 1987 and they hold a good selection of her work.