Painterly relations: recent exhibitions at the Royal Academy and Tate Britain reassessed the work of three British painters: William Nicholson and the John siblings, Gwen and Augustus

Two significant museum exhibitions in London earlier this year--"The Art of William Nicholson" at the Royal Academy and "Gwen John and Augustus John" at Tate Britain--addressed three 20th-century British painters whose reputations have waxed and waned over time. Besides common ambivalences toward modernism, a link among these artists are the problematics of family ties: the Johns were siblings, and despite very different sensibilities were often subject to comparison for that reason alone. William Nicholson (1872-1949), meanwhile, was father to Ben Nicholson, a standard-bearer of modernism and abstraction in British art, something that turned out to be a mixed blessing for a painterly traditionalist.

Dynamics of family and politics of style notwithstanding, the main link between these historically contemporary exhibitions was the timeliness of these reassessments: through judicious selection and display and original scholarship, the organizers of the shows revealed three fabulous painters at their best. While all three were shown in depth, the curators cut tightly argued paths that were at times indifferent toward the actual sum of each artist's oeuvre and style. The protean Augustus John (1878-1961), for instance, was heavily edited to fit around a fulsome representation of his sister's much shorter career (born in 1876, she died in 1939); none of the work of his last 20 years was included.

The account of William Nicholson was heavily biased in favor of the genres in which he excelled: still life and the small, plein-air landscape. He was, however, and probably remains best known for an early career as a graphic artist, creating posters and prints that can stand with the innovations of Lautrec, the Nabis and Art Nouveau/Jugendstil designers. His woodcut of Queen Victoria walking her Highland terrier, for instance, with the monarch depicted as a homely, squat widow (the publisher William Heinemann compared her to a tea cosy) is iconic. The prints, including those produced with his sometime brother-in-law James Pryde under the name J. & W. Beggarstaff, as well as his almanacs of London Types, Twelve Sports, and alphabets, were generously but compactly presented as a preface to a show which also held back on portraiture, the activity that accounted for the bulk of his production and his livelihood (and which earned him his knighthood in 1936).

The retrospective was the first in London since 1942, when the National Gallery (its collections in safe storage) presented his works on otherwise bare wartime walls. The chief curator of the recent show, American art critic Sanford Schwartz, also published a full-scale biographical monograph on Nicholson with Yale in 2004. Schwartz has adopted a polemical zeal in his advocacy of Nicholson to match his 1992 monograph on the 19th-century Danish realist Christen Kobke: in the case of Nicholson, his argument--shared with British painter Merlin James, an essayist in the Royal Academy catalogue--is for a maverick who eluded the mainstream modernist esthetic of his time not out of conservatism so much as a kind of radical alternative to mainstream modernism. On the one hand, Nicholson displays a devotion to perceptual values essentially unchanged since the 17th and 18th centuries (influences included not just obvious forebears like Velazquez and Chardin but, a less likely source, the French etcher and cartographer Jacques Callot); on the other, the sheer variety in his handling of materials, his willingness to adopt radically different sensibilities as seemed appropriate to each image or pictorial idea, betrays an unexpected affinity with postmodernism.

A group portrait titled The Canadian Headquarters Staff (1917-19), though unique in Nicholson's oeuvre in scale, composition and its sense of historic moment, is nevertheless typical in the way it seems at first glance an Edwardian period piece, but then yields its pictorial intelligence. His largest canvas, this roughly 8-by-9-foot painting was loaned for the show by the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Ottawa. Max Aitken, the future Lord Beaverbrook, was a newspaper magnate and British cabinet minister who commissioned major murals from contemporary artists, including Sargent, Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis, for prospective Valhallas in Canada and Britain, which were never built.

The Canadian Headquarters Staff depicts a group of generals and one major gathered informally, some lost in their own thoughts, others listening to a colleague who reads from a dispatch. The figures are similarly outfitted in shiny brown boots, green coats, canes and red-banded caps; the carpet beneath them conforms to the same muted, martial tones. Dominating the picture, however, and the figures that make up its ostensible group portrait, is a staggering, gargantuan aerial photograph that serves as backdrop. Aerial photography was a crucial tool in the Canadian war effort; this one shows a classic image of Great War destruction: the ruined medieval Cloth Hall gutted during the Second Battle of Ypres in which Canadian valor in the face of Germany's first use of mustard gas was decisive to a historic victory. Nicholson inverts the sense of background and foreground, as the sepia photograph is evidently the main event, not just historically but in pictorial and painterly terms as well. Despite the fact that the figures adopt poses of defiance and decisiveness and that the play of light on leather lends them dash in the tradition of the swagger portrait, these soldiers are clearly overwhelmed by circumstances.