Early in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder – the rather dreary and socially-out-of-his-depth narrator – is lured off to Venice by his unlikely new chum (Waugh’s word), the determinedly self-pitying Sebastian Flyte, and Sebastian’s very tiresome teddy bear, Aloysius. The purpose of their visit is to stay with Sebastian’s father, Lord Marchmain, and his mistress, Cara. Lord Marchmain asks the boys about their plans. Sebastian tells his father that Charles is very keen on painting.

“Yes? Any particular Venetian painter?” “Bellini,” I answered rather wildly. “Yes? Which one?” “I’m afraid I didn’t know there were two of them.” “Three, to be precise. You will find that in the great ages painting was very much a family business.”

Up to a point, Lord Marchmain is correct. Jacopo Bellini had two painter sons, Gentile and Giovanni – the latter probably the one Charles Ryder had in mind. The Bassano family would be another example: three generations of painters starting with Francesco da Ponte, then his son Jacopo, followed by Jacopo’s three sons. There were three artists in the Carracci family – Ludovico, and his cousins Agostino and Annibale, who were brothers. Better known these days, and alas not exclusively for artistic reasons, are the painters Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia. Tintoretto maintained a huge workshop, his chief assistants being his sons Domenico and Marco, and his daughter Marietta.

These reflections are inspired by the William Nicholson exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester. In his introduction to another exhibition – The Nicholsons: A Story of Four People and Their Designs, held at York City Art Gallery in 1988 – Hugh Casson wrote: ‘The Nicholsons are a family of artists. This makes them doubly unusual because families of artists, as opposed to families of statesmen, industrialists, farmers or soldiers, are rare. Perhaps the self-obsession that is the artist’s strength makes him or her inevitably not a family person. No painter, I would guess, would show his studio to his son and say “One day all this will be yours.” The Nicholsons are not only artists themselves; they also married artists, and many of the youngest generation are in the art world.’

All this is true. William Nicholson was married to Mabel Pryde, sister of James Pryde, William’s partner in J&W Beggarstaff. The poster designs the Beggarstaffs produced were revolutionary. Mabel’s art was the subject of an exhibition at The Grange Gallery, Rottingdean, in 2024. Ben Nicholson was the eldest son of William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He married two artists: Winifred Nicholson (née Dacre) and later Barbara Hepworth. Nancy Nicholson, the third child and only daughter of William and Mabel, was an illustrator and, primarily, a designer; she married Robert Graves. The youngest child, Kit Nicholson, was an architect whose practice Hugh Casson joined in 1934. The fourth of the four Nicholsons in the York exhibition was the fabric designer EQ Nicholson, Kit Nicholson’s wife.