Francis Nicholson

Biography

(b. Yorkshire, 1753 - d. 1844)

Francis Nicholson was an English landscape painter who is thought to have visited Ireland in the early 1800s at the behest of his Irish patrons Lord de Blacquiere and Sir Henry and Lady Tuite.

T.S.R. Boase records that "in his day he [Nicholson] was regarded as an experimental artist, using the new practice of stopping out the highlights, and important as a teacher" (he wrote a watercolor manual for landscapists, which ran to several editions), and emphasized both Nicholson's early grasp of the possibilities of lithography for watercolor painters, and his founding role in the OWS in London (see T.S.R. Boase, English Art 1800-1870, Oxford University Press, 1959, pp.41-42). Nicholson's son Alfred (1788-1833) painted more extensively in Ireland.