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one.’
    Meanwhile he wrote passionately to Jeanne Bourgoint. He called her his ‘adorable little hare’, his ‘dearest little friend’, his ‘dear little Jeanne’. ‘I love you terribly,’ he wrote, ‘I do not hesitate to tell you that you are the only woman for me.’ For all the talk of her body, ‘so perfect and firm’, however, Wood felt he had to make it clear that he was not in a position to make what Huyton would have called an honest woman of her. ‘I prefer to tell you frankly that it will be several years before I can really support two people’, and therefore, ‘to prove my limitless love I do not want you to hesitate for a moment if by chance you find someone who can make your life more beautiful or easier’.
    The obvious, i.e. mildly paradoxical, interpretation is that Wood was unconsciously signalling the limits of his devotion. In view of the guileless, literal way he wrote, however, it may be that he meant no more than he said: that he was short of cash.
    On his return to London in the autumn Wood was taken by Cedric Morris, a painter he had encountered in Cornwall, to a flat in Chelsea that belonged to two then almost unknown English painters: Ben and Winifred Nicholson. It was a decisive moment. If the drift in Christopher Wood’s life towards drugs, danger andfrivolity could be exemplified in his acquaintance with Luisa Casati and Violette Murat, then the Nicholsons could be said to offer an exact counterweight – personal austerity, country living and a puritanical dedication to work. Ben was the son of the painter William Nicholson and Winifred also came from an artistic family. Their own work, and their marriage, were at a fragile point of development.
    From the outset, Wood’s friendship with them appeared momentous. Winifred Nicholson recalled the first meeting in almost apocalyptic terms: ‘I was dressing in a little white room I had at our flat in Chelsea… and somebody was talking with Ben and Cedric down in Ben’s studio. I had no idea who it was but they went on talking and talking, with a voice that moved me strangely…And I sat and cursed-for half an hour-and I cursed and cursed. I did not want something to come into my life, as big as my love for Ben, and to come like this with fire …’
    Winifred Nicholson, who was pregnant at the time, was a woman of powerful religious and emotional convictions. She formed a passion for Christopher Wood that was the more harrowing for being chaste. Self-sacrifice was at the core of her life, and the scope for it in the triangular relationship that developed between Wood, her husband and herself only strengthened her feelings for him. She was a Christian Scientist with firm beliefs in purity and the after-life; she seemed to see in Wood from the first day some intoxicating spiritual innocence.
    It led her to exaggerate the strength of the paintings Wood had done in St Ives, which she saw at Tony Gandarillas’s house in Cheyne Walk. ‘He was showing us his summer’s work … Crowded together in his small bedroom were an amazing array of canvases. He produced masterpiece upon masterpiece … dark with adventure and imagination. We walked home in the high skies. Here was England’s first painter. His vision is true, his grasp is real, his power is life itself.’
    England’s first painter … his power is life itself… However much of Winifred Nicholson’s euphoria is discounted, there remains in it the recognisable effect that Wood’s paintings had on those who appreciated them. In the world of English painting, a world reduced in French eyes to Sickert’s grim interiors andJohn’s banal society portraits, Wood was on the verge of doing something different. If Sickert had been an honorary consul in Dieppe, bringing news of the commotion that had bypassed England, Wood was able to offer something of its spirit in his work. Winifred Nicholson was too quick with praise that the pictures did not yet deserve, but what she wrote