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Description: Condition
A. Original colour lithograph from "Twelve Portraits"
published
by William Heinemann, London 1899.
Presented in 16 x 20 in. acid free, archival museum mat, with framing
labels. Ready to frame. Shipped boxed flat via Fedex.
Certificate of Authenticity.
See our Terms of Sale
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H.M. Queen Victoria (1837-1901)
Queen Victoria is associated with Britain's great age of industrial
expansion, economic progress and, especially, empire. At her death,
it was said, Britain had a worldwide empire on which the sun never
set. Her reign lasted almost 64 years, the longest in British history.
"Nicholson did this image in 1897 just after his
association with James Pryde as The Beggarstaff
Brothers had come to an end. But his revolutionary approach to design
which marked the Beggarstaff posters, found further expression in
the small-scale woodcuts on which he then concentrated. The portrait
of Queen Victoria was so revolutionary and daring for the period
that when Heinemann first saw it he was unwilling to issue it. However,
when exhibited public acclamation made it one of the most successful
images of the era.
William Nicholson's woodblock prints of the 1890's were amongst
the most revolutionary British print images of the era. They used
a treatment of form, with a stylized simplification of shape, and
a handling of perspective and picture space which had had no precedent
in British art. Influences of Japanese art, and a parallel thinking
to, if not a direct knowledge of, the ideas of Toulouse Lautrec
and of the Nabis painters in Paris at the same period can certainly
be felt, although there is no record that Nicholson had actually
studied either at this date." (Weston)
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