Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll — garden designer, craft revivalist, writer, and collaborator with Edwin Lutyens in creating some of England's greatest Arts and Crafts gardens — was painted by Nicholson in 1920 when she was in her late seventies and already a legend of British horticulture. Jekyll's own engagement with colour was deeply artistic; she designed planting schemes with the eye of a painter, having trained as an artist before failing eyesight drove her to horticulture. Nicholson's portrait engages with this background, treating his subject not as a garden-world celebrity but as a fellow visual artist of formidable intelligence. The National Portrait Gallery holds the portrait, which has become one of the most famous images of any twentieth-century British designer.

Nicholson handled the elderly Jekyll with the same tonal economy he brought to his still lifes — the face is built from a restricted palette of warm flesh tones, the setting reduced to near-abstraction. The famous gardening boots (painted separately in a companion piece) are absent here; the portrait concentrates entirely on the force of the sitter's presence.