After his first visit to Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in 1934, Nicholson wrote: ‘[T]he thing I remembered most was the feeling of light ... The feeling in his studio must have been not unlike the feeling in one of those hermit’s caves where lions used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws.’ Shortly afterwards Nicholson started to paint rectilinear arrangements in primary colours and tones of blue, grey and white. Gallery label, February 2010 [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nicholson-june-1937-painting-t00050]