William Nicholson (1872–1949) is among the most admired and elusive painters in the history of British art. In the first four decades of the 20th century, Nicholson explored the genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life with exceptional inventiveness, wit, and technical skill. His distinctive paintings were neither academic nor modernist, and his aversion to art groups and his reluctance to make public pronouncements about art have made it difficult to place his work within the main narratives of 20th-century art history. The breadth of Nicholson's works in oil is revealed for the first time in this lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné.

Author and scholar Patricia Reed offers detailed entries for each of Nicholson's oil paintings, along with a comprehensive chronology of his life. The art historian Wendy Baron gives a context for Nicholson in British art at the beginning of the 20th century, and the painter and critic Merlin James celebrates the virtuosity and subtlety of Nicholson's painting technique. This magnificent and substantial catalogue brings to the fore Nicholson's vast achievement in oils.