Andrew Nicholl

(b Belfast, 4 April 1804; d London, 16 April 1886). Irish painter and draughtsman. He was apprenticed to a Belfast printer and worked as a compositor for The Northern Whig. He probably learnt watercolour technique from his brother William Nicholl (1794-1840), who was also a painter, and studied in the Dulwich College Picture Gallery after moving to London in 1830. He then went to Dublin, where he exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1832, and did much landscape drawing for printed reproduction in the Dublin Penny Journal during the 1830s, as well as for Samuel Carter Hall's Ireland, its Scenery, Character, etc and for several collections of lithographic views. In 1840 he returned to London, exhibiting at the Royal Academy; in 1846 he was sent by the British government to teach drawing at the Colombo Academy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and painted a number of watercolour views there. Returning from Ceylon he lived at times in London, Belfast and Dublin, becoming a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1860. Nicholl's early topographical paintings are in a hard-edge style, which yielded to a more Romantic approach. His most original work is the series of watercolours of wild flowers observed close up with a distant landscape (e.g. View of Wild Flowers with the Mussenden Temple in the Background, late 1830s; priv. col., see Crookshank and Glin, pl. 41). Some of his watercolours may be seen in the British Museum, London, and some of his drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

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