William Nicholson

An Alphabet by William Nicholson: The Famous Twenty-Six in Pure Black and White

William Nicholson (1872 -1949) was a painter, engraver, graphic artist, stained glass craftsman, author, illustrator and theatre set designer with an astonishing gift: he pursued the light and pinned down the shadows with a visual brevity and mastery rarely seen in Western Art. The images within this book still stand as an exemplar of how to distil the essence of three dimensions into two colours, proving a continual inspiration to generations of graphic artists since. Each image occupies one side of one page, the other side remaining blank to facilitate digital reproduction thus requiring minimal cleanup. It is our pleasure to present, in a scanner-friendly printed format, the following images as Nicholson originally saw them, and before time and pigment altered them forever.