March 17 1950 (still life)

After he studied briefly at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Ben Nicholson visited Paris during the 1920s, where he was influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso. Nicholson became a proponent of non-figurative art through the 1930s and was the first British painter to champion the international Modernist style. Through still lifes, he integrated abstraction with the tangible world. Many examples include painted views from a window in Cornwall, where he lived from 1939 to 1958. With its translucent, overlapping layers of paint applied in thin washes of subtle colors, March 17 1950 (still life), typifies Nicholson’s work from the early 1950s. The same mugs, cups, glasses, jugs, and plates appear in different variations.

Enthralled with this picture, Duncan Phillips held the artist’s first solo exhibition in a US museum in 1951. The Phillips Collection owns six works by Nicholson, the last of them given in memory of Phillips in 1967 by the artist’s widow and son.