Art Wanted

Audley Dean Nicols

Audley Dean Nicols (1875 - 1941) was active/lived in Texas.  Audley Nicols is known for Landscape and genre painting, illustration.

Audley Dean Nicols:
Born: September 22, 1875; Sewickley, Pennsylvania
Died: November 13, 1941; El Paso, Texas
Known for: Landscape and genre painting, illustration
Name Variants: Audley Dean Nicols

An illustrator by training, in mid-career Audley Dean Nicols began to paint the landscapes of the Desert Southwest. He earned regional and national recognition for his style of photographic realism in the depiction of the Southwest’s mountains and deserts, including election to the Southern National Academy of Design.

Born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Nicols received his first art lessons from his mother, an accomplished draftswoman and painter, whose family included Louise McLaughlin, one of the originators of the art-pottery movement that swept the U.S. in the late 1800s, and Louise’s brother, James, Cincinnati’s premier Victorian architect.

As a child Nichols contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis—TB that infected the bones of his legs and hips. The disease left him with a pronounced limp and delicate health. Knowing that physically strenuous work was impossible for him, he decided to make a career of illustration. He moved to New York City where he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, studying under the illustrator and academic painter Kenyon Cox, and muralists Henry Siddons Mowbray and Edwin Howland Blashfield. Within two years he was working as an illustrator for Harper’s magazine, then for The Century, and was being included in salons and parties with famous illustrator-guests like Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy.

After a few years, his health broke down, and he returned to his childhood home to recover. There, he began to try his hand at oil painting, mainly portraits. While he continued to do magazine illustration, Nicols shifted his focus to oils and by 1904 was painting well enough that his canvas The Reverie was accepted into the ninth Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh.

In about 1912, Nicols began making annual trips to the Southwest. With Tucson as a base, he would camp in the desert with a companion or two, sketching and painting the desert landscape. After two or three months, he would return to Sewickley to turn his sketches into finished paintings. By 1915, his desert landscapes were being featured in special exhibitions at Pittsburgh’s Wunderly Brothers Gallery, one of the region’s two major art dealers.

Following shortly on his marriage to Irish immigrant Mary Mahoney and the birth of their son, Nicols moved with his family to El Paso in 1919. From a studio in a rock house that he and Mary built at the base of Mt. Franklin, he continued painting desert scenes, ranging from West Texas to Arizona, southern New Mexico, and northern Mexico. With the help of painter and promoter Harry Wagoner, Nicols’ sales and reputation grew. His desert paintings were typically 16 x 24 inches or smaller. But in 1922, he was commissioned to paint a 4 x 16-foot view of El Paso for the First Mortgage Company.

His style—distinctive desert vegetation in the foreground, painted with almost photographic detail; shadows of clouds on the desert floor; and the distant mountains sheathed in a thin purple haze—became known as “the Nicols technique.” Other local artists emulated him; collectively they became known as the “Purple Mountain Painters,” with Nicols as their acknowledged dean.

When Edgar B. Davis and the San Antonio Art League sponsored national art competitions in 1927-1929, Nicols won prizes all three years in the category reserved for Texas artists. His canvases were toured with other winners to Columbia University in New York City and throughout Texas.

In 1929, Nicols’ canvas of the highest peak in the Guadalupe Mountains, El Capitan, was made into a lithograph and distributed nationally by the Texas and Pacific Railroad to advertise its West Texas lines. Also that year, architect Henry Trost invited him to design a 42-foot stained glass mural for the mezzanine of the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, and to paint a 6 x 7-foot canvas, Cave Creek Canyon – Chiricahua Mountains, to crown the marble staircase.

Late in 1930, Nicols was elected to the Southern National Academy of Design; membership was capped at twenty-five, and those chosen became members for life. Thereafter, Nicols signed his paintings with the initials “SNA” following his name.

In August of 1932, Nicols suffered a brain hemorrhage that impaired his fine-motor control and ultimately ended his painting career. His health deteriorated, and on November 13, 1941, he died at home in the rock house at the base of Mount Franklin. El Paso’s artists attended his funeral as a group in his honor.  

Museums: (in addition to the El Paso Museum of Art and the Tucson Museum of Art)
Phoenix Art Museum
Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
San Antonio Art League and Museum

Publications: (in addition to those listed)
2021: Duke, Thomas A. and Gayle Boss, Everything but Gray: The Life of Audley Dean Nicols

Keywords: (in addition to those listed)
 Art Style: Photo-realism, before 1940
 Geography: Pennsylvania, before 1920
 Exhibition/Expo: Regional/National/International: Ninth Carnegie International Exhibition; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1904

Source: Everything but Gray: The Life of Audley Dean Nicols, by Thomas A. Duke and Gayle Boss, © 2021. Order book   ...  [Displaying 5969 of 7283 characters.]  Artist bio

Artist auction records

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Research resources

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