Nov 59 (Epidaurus) is a large format table-top still-life painting made on a curving fibreboard. The subtitle, ‘Epidaurus’, refers to a ruined ancient city in mainland Greece. Ben Nicholson and his wife Felicitas Vogler made a tour of Greece in April and May 1959, which included Epidaurus along with many other sites. Nicholson sometimes referred to his subtitles as ‘luggage tags’ and they reveal the connection he perceived between a specific place and the abstract forms or still-life imagery of his work. Nov 59 (Epidaurus) is composed from cleanly delineated areas of contrasting tones. The palette is predominantly a narrow range of ochre, earth green, pale and dark brown, with the exception of an area of white at the centre. This central area is markedly opaque in contrast to the mottled, translucent colours that surround it. Neighbouring areas create contrasts of light and dark, which have spatial implications; the lower register suggests table legs and the shaded area underneath the table, while the bright, central band of the painting suggests a table top. The still-life objects—a goblet, a multi-faceted jar, etc.—were drawn with pencil into the ground of white paint, and their clarity is in marked contrast with the painterly, atmospheric qualities of the tonal areas. The draughtsmanship is characteristically rhythmic and virtuosic, and the lines cross a large sweep of the board in dramatic gestures. Much of the surface has been textured with crazing, which further enriches the layered and scraped fabric of the painting.

The use of a concave panel with a shallow curve was innovative and recalls the object quality so important to the still lifes of Nicholson’s cubist precursors. Nicholson first used curving panels in two monumental works commissioned for the liner ship MV Rangitane in 1949. They were followed by a commission for the Festival of Britain in 1951, a mural measuring nearly five metres in width that adorned a curving wall outside one of the restaurants on the South Bank. He also used the technique of a curving board in another large still-life painting of 1959, August 1959 (Gadero), which was shown alongside Nov 59 (Epidaurus) at Galerie Charles Lienhard in 1960. In the case of Nov 59 (Epidaurus), the panel is cradled with highly finished woodwork and refined joinery. Whilst living in Switzerland, Nicholson worked closely with a local carpenter and these two cradled paintings of 1959 may be early examples of this collaboration.

Still-life imagery was a mainstay of Nicholson’s artistic identity. After an extended period between 1935 and 1944 when his work was predominantly abstract and constructivist, he rediscovered a sense of joy and meaning in the composition of mugs, jugs, bottles and goblets. In a letter to his brother-in-law the architectural historian John Summerson, written in March 1944, Nicholson described his ‘first undiluted spell of ptg since war started’. ‘[N]o exagggeration [sic] to say that I’ve averaged a ptg a day for the last fortnight or so and’, he continued, ‘like a dog returning to his vomit these have been still life and fishing floats and even playing cards’. This marked the beginning of a new phase in his career, during which the table-top still life helped to win him wider international attention beyond the comparative insularity of avant-garde art circles in Britain and France.

Paintings such as Nov 59 (Epidaurus) belong to a burgeoning period of international recognition in Nicholson’s career. In 1952, he won first prize in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition with his painting Dec 5—49 (poisonous yellow) (fig. 1)—a large-format still-life painting. This and other still-life paintings of 1949 were characterised by a higher horizon line, which allowed dense arrangements of objects to fill the entire tableau, and the use of more adventurous, dissonant colour choices. Pittsburgh was the first in a succession of awards that he garnered in the fifties. His solo exhibition at Galerie Apollo, Brussels, was awarded the Belgian Critics Award in 1954. The same year he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and received the Ulisse acquisition prize. In 1956, he won the inaugural Guggenheim International Award for his painting August 1956 (Val d’Orcia) (fig. 2). And in 1957, he was given the International Prize for painting at the São Paulo Bienal.

Such critical endorsements contributed to Nicholson’s commercial success, both in the United States and central Europe. Nicholson’s first solo exhibition in the US was held at Durlacher Brothers, New York, in 1949. It included twenty-eight works completed since 1933, nearly half of which were still lifes made since 1945. From 1952, the year he received first prize in Pittsburgh, some of Nicholson’s most reliable collectors were American museums in search of his monumental, recently made still-life paintings. Between 1952 and 1957, a host of eminent art institutions acquired post-war still-life paintings including Toledo Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Such purchases went a long way towards canonising these works as some of the most successful in Nicholson’s long career. In Europe, Nicholson’s commercial success was partly facilitated by two exhibitions at Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, in 1959 and 1960, where paintings such as Nov 59 (Epidaurus) were purchased by private European collectors. More recently, the prestige of Nicholson’s large format still-life paintings of the fifties was again demonstrated when April 57 (Arbia 2), a table-top still life painted in 1957, set the record auction price for Nicholson’s work.

Nov 59 (Epidaurus) was made in Switzerland. In March 1958, Nicholson left his home and studio in St Ives to live near Brissago, a village in the canton of Ticino in the Italian part of Switzerland, which overlooks Lake Maggiore. Ensconced near the centre of the European continent, he was well situated to explore the antique and medieval remains that spurred his imagination and set his sharp pencil drawing. His growing commercial success provided the finance for his travels. As John Russell noted in 1969, it was ‘more than ten years since Ben Nicholson produced a major painting, if by “painting” we understand a picture painted in oils on canvas.’ In fact, Nov 59 (Epidaurus) is one of the last monumental still-life paintings that Nicholson made before throwing his creative energy into carving abstract reliefs. It represents a brief continuation of the acclaimed, large format table-top paintings made in Cornwall between 1949 and 1958.