Rachel Nicholson was born in 1934, one of triplets, to the artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. The family moved from Hampstead to St Ives, Cornwall in 1939. Rachel had no formal training and started painting in her early 40s after her youngest child started school. She married the Alzheimer’s researcher Dr Michael Kidd; and has three children.
Rachel began her career with still life compositions, which developed over the years into a range of landscape images from Cumbria, Derbyshire and the West Country where she spent most of her childhood. The arrangement of objects, whether within her compositions or outside them, particularly in her home, is equally important. Rachel inherited her love of still-life objects from her farther Ben Nicholson, and he from his father William Nicholson.