1932 (Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise)

This painting depicts the likeness of Barbara Hepworth reflected in the window of a modest hotel-restaurant. In the summer of 1932 Nicholson and Hepworth visited cubist painter Georges Braque in Dieppe. The use of words to emphasise the flatness of the picture surface was a device employed by Braque between 1910 and 1920, but the sparseness of the composition and lack of tangible objects was particular to Nicholson. He wrote that the paintings' roughness was a forerunner of his first abstract relief, made at the end of 1933.

Credit: Presented by Mr and Mrs Michael Sacher through the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1967