John Miller Nicholson

Manx National Heritage’s latest exhibition features one of the Isle of Man’s most important artists, John Miller Nicholson.

He was considered by his contemporaries and later generations to have been the ‘Manx National Artist’ and ‘one of Manxland’s most gifted sons’. Nicholson’s work was frequently compared to that of Turner, one of Britain’s greatest artists, and was also greatly admired by John Ruskin, the leading Victorian art critic.

But the words of a fellow Manx artist, Archibald Knox, following Nicholson’s death in 1913, show the high esteem in which Nicholson was held by his contemporaries:

The success he achieved in dealing with colour… accurate in drawing and in the weights of colour; full of a knowledge of light… His skill with pigments was perfect; no modern painter has it in an equal degree…

So who was John Miller Nicholson?

Nicholson was a man of many talents – he was a painter and decorator, an artist, a graphic designer, an illustrator, a photographer, a musician but also a family man and a man of faith.

Nicholson was born in Douglas in 1840, the eldest son of an English housepainter, William Nicholson, from Cumberland and Christian Bell. His natural artistic ability was recognised at an early age and encouraged by his mother.

The lad had a proud and independent spirit, a love for the beautiful in form and colour, a talent for music and a determination to master difficulties. Nicholson confessed that he inherited these qualities from his mother.

William Nicholson came to the Isle of Man in the 1830s and in 1838 went into partnership with Thomas Gill to start ‘Gill and Nicholson’ – a firm of house, sign, furniture and ornamental painters, glaziers and paper hangers in Church Street, Douglas.

The growing town of Douglas and changing decorative tastes as simple Georgian house interiors were replaced by more ornate and highly decorated Victorian interiors will have ensured that there was plenty of work for William Nicholson and his partner.

In April 1839, William Nicholson married Christian Bell, the daughter of John Bell, a ship’s carpenter from Douglas, at Kirk Braddan (now Old Kirk Braddan Church) and the following year, their eldest child, John Miller Nicholson, was baptised in the same church.

By 1841, the business had moved to 3 Well Road, listed in newspaper advertisements as being opposite the Methodist Chapel, if potential customers needed directions to find their new premises in Douglas.

The partnership of ‘Gill and Nicholson’ was dissolved in July 1841 but the Well Road premises were to continue to be home to William Nicholson and the next three generations of the Nicholson family working as painters and decorators until well into the 20th Century.

In 1844 tragedy struck when Christian Nicholson died and William Nicholson was left a widower with a young family of three boys. Nicholson remarried in June 1846 and by 1861, the growing Nicholson family were living at Finch Road.

John Miller Nicholson was educated at the Douglas Diocesan Grammar School and specialised in his art lessons in lettering, a skill that would have been of great use in his later work in illustration and graphic design.

When he left school, he became an apprentice painter and decorator in his father’s business on Well Road (later to be named Well Road Hill and now on the side of the Chester Street car park in Douglas).

But while learning his trade, Nicholson continued to draw and paint and spent several years copying pictures, photographs and designs to improve his art.

Manx National Heritage has several pen and ink drawings in the National Art Collection from Nicholson’s studio that show how his artwork developed through the 1860s and early 1870s.

An 1865 pen and ink drawing of a plaster cast of a statue of a small child carrying a basket is an accurate and competent work of art but is nowhere near as accomplished a work as a charcoal drawing of a classical nude completed only three years later in 1868.

Nicholson obviously felt that only by practice and constant observation could he improve as an artist.

So together with a copy of Frank Howard’s The Sketcher’s Manual, Nicholson drew (and redrew) the world around him and carefully and painstakingly copied architectural illustrations from The Building News and stereoscopic (early photographic) views of the Isle of Man. He also studied and copied the work of his artistic heroes, such as Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), a prominent English marine painter, and Samuel Prout (1783-1852), considered to be one of the masters of British architectural painting.

Slowly Nicholson’s patience and dedication helped him to develop from an enthusiastic and competent amateur into a professional artist with his own visual style and artistic vision. Nicholson was about to become recognised as a talented and gifted artist, not just on the Isle of Man but also further afield as well.

Discover next week how Nicholson’s artwork impresses and gains admirers in London in a leading private art gallery.

Visitors to ‘John Miller Nicholson – A Manx National Artist’ will have the opportunity to discover for themselves why Nicholson was held in such high esteem as an artist. Discover more about his life and work in Manx National Heritage’s latest exhibition at the Manx Museum.

The exhibition is on display until August 31 and features a selection of Nicholson’s finest works, including oil paintings, watercolours, pencil sketches, graphic designs and photographs. Admission is free.

John Miller Nicholson’s ‘day job’ was as a painter and decorator and one half of the family business of Nicholson Brothers, operating in premises on Well Road Hill, that had been first started in 1841.

But, following years of copying and meticulous study, he had developed from being a competent amateur artist into a well-regarded professional artist with a growing reputation. His attention to detail and the capturing of every aspect of a scene can be seen in his 1874 watercolour painting Under the Chasms, Rushen, 1874.

His friend, J.E. Douglas, said of the work: ‘The locality is one of the most weird and lonely haunts in Manxland. The picture is a study in line and colour of precipitous crags and wrack-coated boulders.

‘Infinite pains have been taken to show the thin layers in the rock-strata, and the fronds of the sea-weed at the base of the cliffs.

‘Many days the artist must have spent striving with brush and pencil to produce a truthful representation of the scene. On one of those days while he was engaged on the work, Nicholson was startled by a loud piercing cry.

‘It was a wail of distress that spent itself in echoes from cavern to cavern. The artist looked up from his canvas and saw a man standing on the top of the cliff; his hands were stretched toward heaven, and he was crying with all his strength: “Lord! Lord have mercy on my soul!”’

Nicholson’s aim in his artwork was, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to be a truthful realist and to capture every detail however minor and insignificant and to represent what one saw without embellishment or gloss.

A lifelong fascination with the sea and maritime life can be seen in Nicholson’s work and the visual record he produced of life and work around Douglas harbour is not one of artistic licence and ‘creativity’ but an accurate and truthful vision where seamen could have identified their own vessel and even counted the links on the chains mooring the vessels.

By the end of the 1870s, Nicholson’s artwork had reached the peak of perfection in terms of detail and subtlety of colour and tone but he was also a very modern artist – he broke the rules of classical composition – there was no central focus to a picture, objects and people were and could be cut off at the edges.

A good example of this can be found in Nicholson’s 1879 watercolour of Douglas Head and Lighthouse.

When viewed at a distance the watercolour appears to be a fresh and bright coastal scene, but on closer inspection the work rewards the viewer with its remarkable quality of detail and its precise technical draughtsmanship. This type of work is of interest not only in terms of its artistic value, but also provides an important historic source and visual record of Douglas Head in 1879.

An intriguing aspect of this painting is that it is of a view people would not normally have seen. It is as if we (the viewer) are sat in a boat with the artist at the mouth of Douglas Harbour, viewing Douglas Head. Several smaller pictures or stories emerge from the larger scene.

A pair of seagulls squabble in the sea; a becalmed fishing boat with its crew stood up holding an oar; a small rowing boat with a single rower (incongruously wearing a bowler hat); a group of young men swimming and diving in the sea around the Port Skillion open-air sea baths; parties of tourists sitting along the headland.

There is no single dominant subject matter for this work, instead Nicholson has produced a detailed snapshot of a typical summer afternoon, leaving us to choose what we want to focus upon – a photographic image in full technicolor of Douglas in the height of the tourist season, 1879.

During the 1870s, Nicholson’s artistic labours were beginning to be recognised and rewarded further afield than the Isle of Man, when his work was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. The Grosvenor Gallery opened in 1877 in Bond Street, a fashionable part of London. The Grosvenor Gallery was considered to be an important and leading private art gallery at the time, in a similar way to the Saatchi Gallery today.

It was known for exhibiting ‘modern’ art and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the new Aesthetic Movement all exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery rather than at the more classical and artistically conservative Royal Academy. Nicholson first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880 in the Watercolour Gallery – a work entitled Fishing-Boats, Douglas Harbour, Isle of Man.

By this time, Nicholson and his artwork had attracted important and influential admirers, such as Lady Loch, the wife of the island’s Lieutenant Governor. As a result of this patronage, Nicholson came to the attention of John Ruskin, a leading champion of the new Arts and Crafts movement.

Ruskin was so impressed that he bought several of Nicholson’s pencil sketches and then donated them to several public art galleries around Britain.

But Ruskin thought that Nicholson, as good as he was, could still achieve greater things and advised him in 1880 that he should travel to Italy.

‘My dear Sir

‘Your drawings are here; and I am much pleased with the large ones – except the oil – which is a mere daub in defiance of all elementary laws of painting – Never touch your shadows – nor if you can help it your light – but shadows never.

‘The green ship with white yards and the cattle (with …) are both extremely meritorious: but you are cramped and chilled by Isle of Manishness. You ought to take knapsack on shoulder, a grey paper book – half a dozen colours and a bit of chalk – and so walk to Naples and back…’

So in 1882, Nicholson set off to Italy on his great artistic journey.

Visitors to ‘John Miller Nicholson – A Manx National Artist’ will have the opportunity to discover for themselves why Nicholson was held in such high esteem as an artist.

Discover more about his life and work in Manx National Heritage’s latest exhibition at the Manx Museum. The exhibition is on display until August 31 and features a selection of Nicholson’s finest works including oil paintings, watercolours, pencil sketches, graphic designs and photographs. Admission is free.

John Miller Nicholson was the son of William Nicholson, a Douglas house painter. Educated at Douglas Grammar School, his natural artistic ability was recognised at an early age. Nicholson spent many years copying pictures, photographs and designs as a method for improving his art, producing as a result vast quantities of pencil sketches of Douglas. By the 1870s his labours were rewarded when his work was exhibited in London at the Royal Academy. He also at this time came to the attention of John Ruskin, a leading champion of the Arts and Crafts movement. On Ruskin’s advice Nicholson travelled to Italy in 1882, bringing about a development in his style. Nicholson worked for the family firm of decorators, played the piccolo for a theatre orchestra and even painted theatrical scenery. His artwork included paintings, drawings, illuminated addresses and the murals of St Thomas’s Church, Douglas. Nicholson’s early work is defined by its attention to fine detail. He produced pencil sketches filled with copious marginal notes which provided the basis and inspiration for later paintings. His visit to Italy led to his style becoming less detailed and more concerned with colour, light, shade, composition and atmosphere. …the success he achieved in dealing with colour…accurate in drawing and in the weights of colour; full of a knowledge of light… His skill with pigments was perfect; no modern painter has it in an equal degree… Archibald Knox, 1913.