Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in 1914, Nick Nicholls forged a path that defies easy categorisation. The son of an English father and an Irish mother, nick nicholls spent significant parts of his childhood with relatives in County Cavan, a geographical duality that would later manifest in his art through a blending of British and Irish sensibilities.
adams.ie
+1
From an early age, nick nicholls was not formally trained in the fine arts; instead, he qualified as a quantity surveyor. It was in 1935 that he made a decisive shift: nick nicholls turned to painting, self‑taught and emboldened by the modernist currents of the time.
adams.ie
+1
His early work featured conventional watercolours, but very quickly he embraced surrealism and abstraction—a transformation visible in later lots of his work where titles and images evoke startling juxtapositions of form and meaning.
adams.auctioneersvault.com
+1
During the late 1930s and into World War II, nick nicholls relocated his studio activity to London, and later to Dublin when wartime upheavals made the British capital less tenable for artistic practice. In Dublin he became associated with the circle of the White Stag Group via Basil Rakoczi, and by 1946 he experienced what has been described as a religious conversion—one that deeply affected the thematic concerns of his work.
adams.ie
The years following his conversion saw nick nicholls pause painting in 1953 to study philosophy and religion. But in the 1960s he returned to his craft with renewed purpose, drawing on his earlier influences such as Cézanne, Picasso, Klee and Miró—alongside an emerging interest in African art and children’s graffiti. This evolution reveals how nick nicholls understood abstraction not only as form but as ontology: art as being, as thought, as spiritual gesture.
adams.ie
In painting after painting, nick nicholls explored the interplay of figure and ground, presence and absence, the dreamlike and the concrete. His works have appeared in auction catalogues under titles like Girl with Figural Pear, Bearded Man with Containers and Cat, and Face on a Teacup with Girl. These pieces reflect the whimsical yet haunting quality of his imagination: nick nicholls delights in the uncanny, the associative, the quietly unsettling.
adams.auctioneersvault.com
+1
Today, some of nick nicholls’s paintings are in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), including an untitled oil on canvas from 1944 (52 × 42 cm) which illustrates his early move toward abstraction.
IMMA
What is notable is how, over the decades, nick nicholls did not become a household name in the same way as some of his contemporaries—but his work remains quietly influential in certain modernist and surrealist circles, especially in relation to Irish‑British abstraction.
The significance of nick nicholls lies not just in his art, but in his trajectory: quantity surveyor turned painter; watercolourist turned surreal‐abstractionist; painter who paused to explore religion and philosophy, only to return with a richer vision. In each phase nick nicholls retained a sense of introspection and detachment—the practice of painting for him was as much internal exploration as external expression.
Collectors of 20th‑century art have occasionally encountered nick nicholls in auction catalogues, where his works are described and valued, though often modestly compared to more famous peers. For instance, the 2016 auction catalogue of Important Irish Art lists works by nick nicholls from 1954 selling in the €300–500 range.
adams.auctioneersvault.com
This offers insight into his status: recognised, respected, historically succinct—but also undervalued relative to more mainstream names.
For students of art history, nick nicholls presents a compelling case study in cross‑cultural identity, self‑taught modernism, and the post‑war shift from representation to abstraction. His story invites reflection on how art movements travel across borders, and how individual artists navigate their own internal maps of influence. If one seeks to trace the roots of modern surrealism and abstraction in the British‑Irish sphere, nick nicholls offers a quiet but resonant waypoint.
In sum, nick nicholls may not headline surveys of 20th‑century art, but his unique voice and thoughtful evolution make him a subject worth revisiting. His work stands as testament to the subtle power of self‑directed practice, of the artist who steps outside formal paths to forge a personal language of form and meaning.
