EQ Nicholson: The Mill House Years with John Craxton

The Grange in Rottingdean, previously home of artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde and their four children, is continuing a series of revelatory exhibitions this summer with one about little known artist and designer Elsie Queen – always known as EQ – who married Ben’s brother Kit (Christopher) the successful Modernist architect and designer. He died in a gliding accident in 1948 aged 43, leaving her with three young children. Previously they had worked together professionally designing interiors for rich patrons, and EQ began designing and printing fabrics from linocuts.

She had had very little formal art training – three unhappy weeks at the Slade, hating the teaching, and a year in Paris studying batik at a college of decorative arts; but as a child she had been surrounded by creative people, painters like David Jones and Ivon Hitchens, and sculptor Frank Dobson. In her teens she worked in the studio of sculptor Betty Muntz and had later been Marion Dorn’s assistant, observing the making of textiles, wall hangings and papers, carpets and rugs.

EQ loved the flowing movements of birds, fish, animals and plant forms – her best-known design, Runner Bean (c1950), appeared both as furnishing fabric (used in HM Yacht Britannia) and one of her hand-printed wallpapers for Cole & Son. She also made fabric designs for machine printing for Edinburgh Weavers.

She spent a lot of her life in Dorset but there is another local Sussex connection through her great friend Peggy Angus, then married to the architectural historian James Richards. EQ frequently visited Angus’ Furlongs home, from where both couples made pre-war (and pre-children) excursions to Dieppe and Paris and EQ was moved to tears by the works of Braque.

The Grange exhibition concentrates on the decade during and just after the war when the young John Craxton, a family friend, tubercular and exempt from war service, spent time living with EQ and her children at the Mill House, Alderholt, in East Dorset. He was barely out of his teens and excitedly forming his views about art and life; they painted together and danced wildly – introducing each other to different kinds of music (modern music from Alban Berg and Lennox Berkely to jazz) and also shared patrons and ideas. Craxton’s friend the young Lucian Freud visited, enjoying her charismatic joie de vivre and the house full of her designs and textiles and family artworks.

At The Mill House, EQ embarked on over a decade of exciting experimental paintings and drawings using what her daughter Louisa calls ‘dazzling, fitful colours’ in gouache, collage and crayon and whatever wartime rationing allowed to come to hand. These revealed her delight in the colours and patterns of domestic utensils, plants in the garden and the landscape she was immersed in.

For her mother’s obituary Louisa wrote that she had ‘magnetism and charm, scintillating and humorous, and [was] great fun’, but that she was also impulsive, restless and demanding. They were both free-thinkers: Craxton had met his match and sharing mutual inspiration they embarked on a life-time correspondence (he used to call her ‘dear Queakle’ or ‘Qeakle’ or many other combinations) of artistic exchanges and encouragement. This continued all his life after he had left for Greece, his admiration and fondness for her and her children undimmed and shining out in the wildly illustrated letters giving us an insight into EQ’s character.

They both loved William Blake but were amusingly critical of some of their own contemporaries, although Craxton was befriended by Graham Sutherland and somewhat influenced by him at this time, sharing sketching expeditions in Wales. They were savage about some of the older school, represented by Kenneth Clark, and enjoyed Blake’s diatribes against the Royal Academy of his own day, and his insistence on the importance of a vigorous line, and the importance of the imagination.

EQ’s wartime correspondence with Peggy Angus shows a different side to life at that time – bringing up children with absent fathers, trying to avoid further pregnancies with the future uncertain, finding suitable childcare, taking in each other’s children and developing close bonds with other women artists evacuated from London. EQ ended up in Alderholt, a town bereft of art shops and painting supplies: Peggy’s letters contain recommendations for getting hold of weaving looms and equipment from Dryads in London by mail order.

All this reminding us that the slightly febrile pursuit of joie de vivre was going on alongside the dark tensions of war and anxiety and the death of friends.

The Grange’s exhibition and accompanying events will fill out the details of EQ’s life and career with talks, text panels and brochure. There is currently an exhibition about her textiles and designs at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge, continuing throughout the summer, also showing work by her daughter Louisa. Her son Tim is also an artist, still working in Dorset, who helped greatly with setting up both exhibitions, as have staff at Pallant House, making rarely seen works available to be enjoyed in Rottingdean.

Words by Carolyn Trant, exhibition co-curator

EQ Nicholson: The Mill House Years with John Craxton is showing at The Grange in Rottingdean from July 18 until August 29. On Saturday August 8, Carolyn Trant will be giving a lecture – My Dear Qeakle – about the lifelong friendship between John Craxton and EQ Nicholson. rottingdeanheritage.org.uk