William Nicholson’s The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas

Willaim Nicholson, The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas (1911), oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland

This work was painted in 1911 when its artist was thirty-nine, in a period when Matisse had recently completed his Fauvist masterpiece Dance, when Braque and Picasso were producing groundbreaking cubist artworks and while Kandinsky and Malevich were painting their way inexorably towards abstraction. These European contemporaries of Nicholson’s were questioning the very idea of illusionistic representationalism with a strident modernism that Nicholson’s son Ben would later champion so effectively in the interwar and post-war British art world. But William never expressed any antagonism towards the avant-garde as far as I can see but seemed rather oblivious to it. There is something rather admirable about his quiet orthodoxy, and although he shunned any attempts to explain or theorise about his own work and disavowed any suggestion of allegory or symbolism in it, there remains nevertheless a paradoxical depth to his pursuit of the depiction of surfaces and reflections that often feels more modern and multifaceted than the Modernists.

This painting is deceptively simple. It depicts a lustreware bowl; that is, a glazed porcelain or pottery vessel which has had a thin film of platinum or gold deposited on it before firing to provide a metallic-like sheen to the finished article. The bowl is shown sitting on top of a table which is covered in a white cloth, the folded creases of which form a large grid pattern on the lower third of the work and whose lines of perspective lend depth of field to the composition. A pile of mostly unshelled peas is shown in the right foreground while two further pods sit to the left. The background is largely black with just the merest suggestion of lightness at the top and a small reflection from the bowl cast onto the blackness just above it and to the right of it. A shadow is cast on the cloth on the left and also behind the bowl. But simplicity is not the same as shallowness and even if Nicholson never consciously intended it, his lustre bowl painting may look like a straightforward study in volume and reflectance at one level, but at another I think it becomes an examination of metaphysical ‘thingness’.

The bowl’s central compositional positioning and relative isolation compared to more typical object-crammed still life paintings make it seem sacramental – it reminds me of a chalice in a Eucharistic offertory. But this idea is undercut by the presence of the humble and casually strewn pea pods which, as one of nature’s uncontrived gifts, contrast so markedly with the artifice of the man-made container for them. The bowl represents itself as something it is not – it looks like silver and gold, but its substance is mostly clay. But then we have to remind ourselves that none of this, neither bowl nor peas, is ‘true’ – it’s all just paint! Nicholson is depicting the improbability of depiction, the sorcery of pigment-into-three-dimensional-thing transubstantiation.

The primary subject of the painting is light itself and its relative reflectance qualities. Again, at a simple level, the bowl is shiny and the peas are matt; the tablecloth is bright, the background dark; half the painting lies in shadow and half in light. But these contrasts only convey part of the ‘story’. This is also a painting about the ways in which light creates a sense of volume and roundness. We know the shape of the bowl because of the way the light is reflected from it. This light is at its most incandescent here just right of the inside centre of the bowl, but also on the centre left rim and on the fluted base. But the most beautiful reflections are shown on the outside body where they seem to deliquesce into the silveriness When viewed close-up, the pea pod reflections on the right just below the rim are mere smudges while the two lonely pods on left are reflected as green commas, one regular one inverted. It is the topsy-turviness of these light reflections that create the illusion that we are looking at a vessel with convexity and concavity. The one opened pea pod is like a commentary on these phenomena, as if echoing the origin of things globular, but doing it so unshowily.

It’s no surprise to me that Nicholson was an admirer of Velázquez whose skill at rendering depth and volume through the depiction of light reflections and contrasting tenebrism was unrivalled. But such illusionistic realism, such artifice was also a way to interrogate or meditate on what a thing is and how light not simply reflects from a thing but in a real sense, creates it, forms it. Great artists from Velázquez to Chardin to Nicholson himself all understood this. A painting can not only represent a thing, but it too can become a thing as real and legitimate as the thing it is depicting. I remember a visit some years ago to The Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool and looking at Millais’ The Black Brunswicker. I was fascinated not so much by the subject, an army officer saying goodbye to his sweetheart on the eve of battle, but for the way that the female figure’s satin dress had been painted. It seemed to me more satiny than real satin.

John Everett Millais, The Black Brunswicker (1860), oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight

Yes, it was a trick, an illusion, but so convincing was its verism that I overlooked the melodramatic staginess of the whole thing, unable to look away for too long from that lustrous and mesmeric dress. I think Nicholson achieves something similar with Lustre Bowl but in a much more pared back minimalist way – his painting isn’t just the representation of a bowl, it is a bowl. It has concentrated presence. It exists in the mind with a mute but insistent authenticity and authority quite as properly as if the original bowl were sitting in front of us instead. In fact, any ‘real’ bowl would seem inadequate in comparison without the gaze of artist and viewer to participate in its morphology. What a strange and perplexing notion this is!

In Lustre Bowl, the impasto paint of the peas, applied with strokes that seem so loose and confident, bring freshness and irreverence to the otherwise solemn feeling that the numinous bowl conveys. Their clustered unruliness and their association with the idea of fertility is like a rebuke to the singleness, pomposity and presumption of the man-made object; the bowl may be a thing that will endure but won’t live (except in its passive ability to reflect light). It’s as if they (the peas) also introduce a little impudence to the strict formality of the still life genre itself. The unbound pile of pods extends beyond the range of the painting, their spontaneity and freedom and their sheer greenness, their evocation of their taste acting as a delightful counterpoint to the gravity and seriousness of the bowl. They somehow manage to make one feel joyous. They suggest that art and nature are equally worthy of our respect and our gaze.