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Notes

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Ben Nicholson's painting of a pretty, quiet harbour bay in weathered hues of gold, magnolia and grey, is disrupted by large abstract shapes that seem to float and hover in the plane. The bay is the tiny harbour of Mousehole, pronounced 'Mowzel', which lies on the coast of Cornwall; and those flat shapes included on the right-hand side of the painting form elements of a still life. This part of the picture is very similar to '1945 (still life)' (1945), a sombre grouping of cups with elegant looping handles, a bottle and perhaps some plates, which recalls the Cubist arrangement of perspectives in the style of Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso. Whilst marrying together two of Nicholson's preferred genres of painting – still life and landscape – additionally, one can see in this painting echoes of Nicholson's staunchly Modernist abstractions, such as the spartan, monochrome 'White Reliefs' of squares and circles that were begun in the 1930s.