Biography

1753 (Pickering, Yorkshire) - 1844 (London)

A landscape painter and drawing master who for the first thirty years of his life lived in a number of Yorkshire towns, learning what little was possible from the local teachers, and painting portraits and animals, largely in oil. He made two visits to London, during one of which he took lessons from C.M. Metz (q.v.) and in 1783 settled in Whitby for nine years. Here he finally took up landscape painting in watercolour, and in 1789 he first exhibited at the R.A. and began to draw for Walker's Copper Plate Magazine. Between 1792 and 1803, when he settled in London, Nicholson continued to move about Yorkshire and made a visit to the Island of Bute with his patron the Marquess of Bute. They toured the other islands and lochs of the Clyde, and Nicholson made many sketches which provided him with subjects for some years. He was in Scotland again in 1812, touring the Lowlands. In 1804 he was one of the Founder Members of the O.W.S. (Ohio Watercolor Society). He resigned from the Society in 1813, partly in order to concentrate on his flourishing practice as a drawing master. In fact, he had made so much money from the sale of his pictures and from lessons that he was virtually able to retire for his last years and to concentrate on experimenting with techniques and pigments.

After his early period as a portrait painter he concentrated on conventional landscapes and coastal scenes, with waterfalls as a favourite feature. Very occasionally, as with the series painted for Sir Richard Colt Hoare at Stourhead, he paints an excellent interior. His daughters Sophia, Marianne (1792-1854) who married William Ayrton, and who married Thomas Crofton Croker, and also his nephew GEORGE NICHOLSON (1787-1878) were all watercolourists and worked very much in his manner. George published two series of lithographs, Six Views of Picturesque Scenery in Goathland, 1821, and Six Views of Picturesque Scenery in Yorkshire, 1822, and there are examples of his work at York A.G. He was probably the son of Nicholson's elder brother who was a house painter in Yorkshire.