William Nicholson was 37 and among the most sought-after portraitists in London when he bought an old vicarage on the Sussex coast in 1909. It was “a mad thing for a man to do,” the artist admitted, leaving him £200 in debt and “in the curiously rotten position of having more houses than food”. 

He had first visited the village of Rottingdean, about five miles east along the coast from Brighton, in 1897, to make a woodcut portrait of Rudyard Kipling. The author of Just So Stories and The Jungle Book was living then at The Elms, across the green from The Grange and a short walk from his aunt Georgiana and her husband, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, at North End House. 

In fact, William stayed with the Burne-Joneses while he worked on the woodcut, though he and Rudyard spent far more time striding the Sussex Downs than in sittings. The author grew equally fond of William’s wife, Mabel – who was also a fine painter – and took to spending his evenings with them at North End House, where he perched on a black box and entertained them with his stories. 

When they eventually acquired The Grange, the Nicholsons and their children (Ben, then 15, Antony, 13, Nancy, 10, and Kit, 5) intended it as a “summer nest” – their principal residence was a sophisticated townhouse in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury – but Rottingdean, with its bracing salt wind and chalk cliffs slowly crumbling into the sea, turned out to be hard to leave. William particularly relished the sense of isolation he found there.  

The Grange was a beautiful house, Georgian, with gardens that in William’s day ran directly onto the South Downs. “One entered a spacious sitting room hall,” Ben recalled in 1930, where “my father had laid with his own hand a black and white Vermeer checked floor.” The artist Paul Nash, who came to stay in 1911 – he and Ben were students at The Slade together – remembered “everything bright and shiny, highly polished painted walls, stiff calendered chintzes, gay pinks and greens…at every meal we ate highly calendered blancmange with bright coloured jam, in keeping with the brightness of the rooms”. 

In 1912, Mabel sold a large painting and with the proceeds commissioned the architect Edwin Lutyens – their very good friend – to build a thatched studio in The Grange’s rear garden that still stands today. She and William must have shared the space because its large, oval-topped, north-­facing window is recognisable in some of his paintings, though it’s said he would paint just about anywhere: on a board leaning against the back of a chair, with children all around him. Photographs show him at work in the garden, too. Apparently the butterflies were attracted by his scent (Bay Rum hair tonic, turpentine and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes) and would alight on him while he painted.  

The Grange became a honeypot for William and Mabel’s friends, including the actress Viola Tree, the artist William Rothenstein, the writer Max Beerbohm. “I am so glad you like the Nicholson troupe,” Beerbohm wrote to Rothenstein in 1911, “they are somehow more like a troupe than a family – Nancy standing with one spangled foot on Nicholson’s head, Ben and Tony branching out on tip-toe from his straddled legs.” Ben recalled how, during one of Rothenstein’s visits, Nancy had taken exception to his son, “little Johnny”, who was “all togged up in an Eton suit, washed and brushed and ironed and combed and not a hair out of place and a gardenia in his buttonhole”, and drenched him with the garden hose. 

For better or worse, portrait commissions remained William’s bread and butter. He travelled to London three or four days a week to secure work or for sittings, either at his clients’ homes, or in the stylish studios he maintained in Chelsea and later St James’s. All that time in gaslit clubs and heavily furnished drawing rooms made him relish the Rottingdean all the more. He could paint for his own pleasure there: still life compositions of lusterware, silver and glass that revel in different surfaces and rapturous impressions of the “blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs”, as Kipling lovingly described them. A painting such as Lustre Bowl with Green Peas (1911) reveals his exquisite instinct for organising the canvas, and that he was at heart a far more adventurous and emotional painter than his portraits suggest: the flare of sunlight on the bowl’s rim, the reflection on its underside and all of it flushed with his presence – he’s here in the room with you, in a way he isn’t always elsewhere.  

When painting outside, it’s said he savoured what he saw to such a degree that his mouth would water as he laid on the paint. He delighted in the way the shadows skimmed and raced across the ridges and lowlands, the land’s softly undulating rhythms, the bright new world suggested by an empty beach.  

In 1914, marital troubles encouraged William to accept an invitation to go to India for six months with Edwin Lutyens, the latter to lay the foundations of New Delhi, William to paint the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge. They sold the house and Mabel leased a house at Harlech in North Wales. There, Nancy met the poet Robert Graves and in 1917, the two became engaged. In 1916, Tony entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and in 1917 was sent to the front in France.  

Tragedy hit the family when in July 1918, Mabel died suddenly from Spanish Flu, and three months later, William received word that Tony had been killed in action, just weeks before the Armistice. “I live entirely by habit now,” William wrote to a friend.  

When he remarried the following year – to Edie Stuart Worsley, with whom he had another child, Liza – William returned to Rottingdean. For three years they lived in Burne-Jones’s old home (by then, The Grange had been sold to Sir George Lewis, a famous criminal lawyer), but the sight of his old home across the green perhaps defeated him in the end. In 1923, they moved to Wiltshire, where Edie’s father bought them a house. All his life, Nicholson apparently remained the life and soul of every lunch and party he gave, but when exhausted or depressed, Liza later observed, he seemed to her to be “wistful for the past, for lost loves and children”. 

Come and find out more in our current exhibition William Nicholson, on until 10 May 2026. 

by Lucy Davies on behalf of Rottingdean Heritage. 

A version of this piece first appeared in The Telegraph. 

Rottingdean Heritage is a charity that looks after The Grange, its gallery and Gertrude Jekyll-designed garden, along with other sites of historic interest in the Sussex village. Following exhibitions devoted to the life of William Nicholson (2022) and Mabel Pryde Nicholson (2024) – the first in more than a hundred years – this summer, The Grange Gallery will show the work of the artist EQ Nicholson, William’s daughter-in-law.