Paintings created on Eigg by celebrated British artist to be auctioned

‘Rhododendrons, Eigg (Pink Rhododendrons)’ is valued at between £25,000 and £35,000 and ‘Sound of Rum from Bay of Laig, Isle of Eigg (The Singing Sands)’ is estimated at between £15,000 and £20,000, were created 30 years apart. 

The paintings, which are said to epitomise the artist’s love for Scotland – and in particular the Hebrides – and feature in the fine art auctioneer’s MODERN MADE: Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Design, Craft and Studio Ceramics sale, which will take place over two days live in London and online.

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Nicholson married the English artist Ben Nicholson in 1920 and they had three children. The two paintings were acquired from her by their elder son, designer Jake (Jacob) Nicholson, who held onto them for the rest of his life. 

Nicholson worked in Scotland repeatedly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, often accompanied by her friend, the poet Kathleen Raine. They stayed on Eigg and Canna and also in Sandaig on the mainland. 

Some three decades passed between Nicholson’s first trip to Eigg with Raine, in the summer of 1950, and her last, in the spring of 1980, with her artist daughter, Kate Nicholson. Nicholson and her daughter spent two weeks on Eigg in May of 1980, where they stayed in a cottage with panoramic views across the sea to the mainland.

Winifred Nicholson painting Rhododendrons, Eigg in the Gatekeeper’s Cottage on Eigg in 1980. (Image: Donald Wilkinson)

Commenting on the paintings, Alice Strang, Associate Director at Lyon & Turnbull, said: “These works are poems in paint about Scotland, by a leading British woman artist. They celebrate a remote and special place which inspired Winifred Nicholson in her fifties and her eighties. 

“She was drawn repeatedly to the beauty of the Hebrides, where the ever-changing weather causes rainbows to occur more frequently than on the mainland, a phenomenon of wonder for an artist fascinated by the possibilities of light and colour in nature.”