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.
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Cecil Rhodes (English, 1853-1902) was a British-born South African businessman, mining magnate, and politician. He was the founder of the diamond company De Beers, which today markets 60% of the world's rough diamonds and at one time marketed 90%. He was an ardent believer in colonialism and was the founder of the state of Rhodesia, which was named after him. Rhodesia, later Northern and Southern Rhodesia, eventually became Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively. He is also especially known today for the scholarship that bears his name.

"Nicholson did this image 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.

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)