"Mother and Son" by Ben Nicholson

"Mother and Son" painted in 1927


English abstract painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) was the son of noted artists Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. Ben Nicholson was born at the former Eight Bells PH (now White Cottage), Village Road, Denham, Buckinghamshire, in 1894, was baptised at the nearby church of St Mary, and moved to London with his parents two years later. He studied at the Slade School, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, another Buckinghamshire artist, and then travelled widely in Europe and the United States for a few years. In 1920 Nicholson married the artist Winifred Roberts. Nicholson’s early work consists of delicately worked still lifes, which show the influence of his father. In the 1920s he began painting figurative and abstract works inspired by Post Impressionism and Cubism, which he had seen whilst travelling. His first one-man show was at the Adelphi Gallery in 1921. In 1932 he visited Paris with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and met Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp.
On subsequent visits to Paris in 1933 and 1934 they met Mondrian and Moholy-Nagy. His works reflect his contact with Braque, and suggest the influence of both Hepworth and Mondrian. In 1937 he became editor of Circle, and from 1939 to 1958 lived in Cornwall with Barbara Hepworth, whom he married in 1938.
His later work moved regularly between abstraction and figuration, always with cool, harmonious colours, subtle textures and precise interlocking shapes. In 1945/46 he moved from reliefs to linear, abstract paintings. Nicholson was commissioned to paint a mural for the Time-Life Building in London in 1952. In 1954 he was given retrospectives at the Venice Biennale and at the Tate Gallery, London, and in 1955 the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 1958 he moved to Ticino in Switzerland, but eventually moved back to London, where he died in February 1982.
Ben Nicholson's work has come to be seen as the quintessence of British modernism. His austere geometric paintings and reliefs are among some of the most influential abstract works in British art.
During his long career he produced works influenced by a variety of styles including, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Neoplasticism. He combined "dirty-textured" earth tones with sections of "clean-flat" bright colors.

Ben Nicholson

"Mother" by Betty Ann Beahm Raynor

Mother, I ask myself, “Who are you?”
Your heart is for your children.
You’re so true.
The Bible says, “They shall rise up and call her blessed”.
Mother, can your children depend on you,
to teach them in the ways of the Lord?
Have you taught them love and kindness
and salvations plan and all that the Way & the Truth can afford?
Have you taught them to love the Lord?
If you have, then you will be called blessed
and your children of you can be proud.
That is my Mother. Blessed.

Written sometime between 1974 and 1981

"A MOTHER’S LOVE" by Clarence J. Beahm

A MOTHER’S LOVE by Clarence J. Beahm

Mother is one of the sweetest names I know.
One always remembers that name wherever he may be,
no matter what the circumstances may be.
So children look into those eyes, listen to that dear voice.
Notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand:
Make much of it while yet you have the most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother.
Read the unfathomable love of those eyes.
The kind anxiety of that tone and look, however alight your pain.

A man never sees how much his mother has been to him till it is too late to let her know that he sees it.
In afterlife you may have friends, fond, dear friends, but never will you again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none other but a mother bestows.
I’m not saying it will happen to you, but a father may turn his back upon a child,
brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies,
husbands may desert their wives and vice versa;
but a mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute,
in the face of the world’s condemnations a mother still loves on,
and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways and repent.
Still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture,
the merry laugh of childhood, the joyful shout of early youth, and the opening promise of manhood.
And she can never be brought to think him unworthy.

The loss of a mother is always severely felt, even though her health may incapacitate her from taking any active part in the care of her family –
still she is a sweet rallying point around which affection and obedience and a thousand tender endeavors to please, concentrate.
And dreary is the blank when such a point is withdrawn.

A mother’s love is the golden link that binds youth to age;
and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek or silvered his brow,
who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion,
or gentle chidings of the best friend that God ever gives us.

No language can express the power and the beauty and heroism and majesty of a mother’s love.
It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints.
And over the wastes of the worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star in Heaven.

Even He who died for us upon the cross, in the last hour, in the inutterable agony of death,
was mindful of His mother, as if to teach us that this Holy love should be our last worldly thought;
the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for Heaven.


"In memory of our dear mother"
Clarence J. Beahm
August 3, 1964

Clarence J. Beahm with his ailing mother Lilly Nicholson Beahm