At the end of each day of painting, Nicholson had developed the habit of cleaning any remaining paint from his palette with turps and rubbing this mixture onto the canvas or board he intended to use the following day. The resulting mix of tones made for a highly varied and unrepeatable base note for the next composition, and we can see in Aug 9–54 (Towednack) how the background of the painting, which at first sight appears to be a light sepia wash, is in fact made up of areas that hint at greens, greys, reds and whites. Across this surface snakes Nicholson’s characteristic line, the 6B pencil offering a variation in thickness as he thinks through his composition. There are traces of earlier lines removed—ghostly forms that have been reworked—or moments where the flow of his hand has responded to a changing thought. The objects that crowd the picture plane are familiar Nicholson forms, their silhouettes drawn from the marble, glass and ceramic pieces he kept in his studio. The goblet form and the two-handled glass vessel with its distinctive lid rising to a shaped knop, are forms we have seen before, but each time they are presented afresh.

The title of this work derives from the small Cornish village of Towednack, a couple of miles from St Ives. In the 1940s, he painted several works showing a window ledge filled with objects, with the view beyond stretching over fields and out to sea. In this work, the window frame is suggested by the L-shaped line in the upper left corner, while the high horizontal to the upper right acts as a reminder of the distant sea and sky. The objects overlap and exchange positions, often appearing to double their presence as Nicholson draws both form and shadow. Here Nicholson seeks to capture that ethereal moment when sunlight and shadow combine as they pass through glass objects. Glassware, of course, casts a different kind of shadow to a solid object, projecting not only its shape but also the light passing through it, and we can see here how the areas of white create that curious effect.

Compositionally, Aug 9–54 (Towednack) demonstrates how Nicholson’s work was moving towards a synthesis of abstraction and still life that would bring him great acclaim in the later part of the decade and secure his position as a key figure in the international modernist movement. The large-scale tabletop still-life paintings that would win him numerous awards and plaudits exemplify precisely this combination of observation and movement—a reinterpretation of still life which, while drawing on Cubist experiments earlier in the century, makes a significant contribution to a tradition that stretches back to the earliest periods of art.

Ben Nicholson’s modernist practice existed in constant dialogue with the art of the ancient past. It is therefore not surprising that his studio collection included several antiquities, among them works from the Cycladic period alongside various ancient vessels. One such object—a fragmentary Cycladic marble torso with V-shaped neck markings—is included in the present exhibition. Such works appear to have inspired Nicholson to strip his compositions back to balanced volumes and incised lines, seeking to achieve a similar poetic equilibrium to that found in the prehistoric, ancient and classical sculpture he so admired.

In a private collection since around 1960, this work was last exhibited in 1955, at the 3rd International Art Exhibition, Tokyo. The success of this event secured great acclaim for Nicholson in Japan and he has been strongly collected in the country ever since.