Professor Jongwoo Jeremy Kim published his article “Picturing the Edwardian Family Man: The Nicholsons at Home” in the journal Art History, volume 42, issue 5.
Two paintings portraying William Nicholson’s family – William Orpen’s “A Bloomsbury Family” (1907–09) and Mabel Nicholson’s “Family Group” (1911) – present domestic images in which nobody seems at home, including the father. Kim’s essay examines the paradox of domestic alienation by exploring these paintings of the Nicholsons – a household that was neither entirely normative nor fully subversive. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) becomes one of the texts through which to understand the gender trouble of “A Bloomsbury Family” and the grim picture of home made by Mabel, the wife of William Nicholson, who was the first costume and set designer for that play. After comparing the Nicholsons with the Bloomsbury Group’s alternative domesticity, and analysing interior liminality in Vanessa Bell’s “Conversation Piece” (1912), the essay concludes by discussing Nicholson’s 1904 portrait of Barrie and the Edwardian family man’s fatigue.